Russell A. Kazal

The Lost World of Pennsylvania Pluralism: Immigrants, Regions, and the Early Origins of Pluralist Ideologies in America

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.	1
"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	2
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	3
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	4
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	5
Yet this depiction of the emergence of ethnic pluralist ideologies has some key weaknesses. These shortcomings are connected to the way that many scholars have conceived of the study of cultural pluralism, namely, as a kind of narrowly defined intellectual history that traces its object's development as a more-or-less systematic philosophy, mostly within the academy or through the writings of a small number of nationally known intellectuals. Such studies are important and essential.⁵ Yet they risk abstracting pluralist ideas from their social context and overlooking pluralist viewpoints articulated by people other than relatively well-known thinkers.	6
In fact, a few historians have uncovered evidence suggesting the need for a longer and broader view of ethnic pluralism in America. Scholars have debated whether Anglo-American reformers at Chicago's Hull House expressed pluralist visions before World War I, while some have found such views articulated by W. E. B. Du Bois in his 1897 call for a "Conservation of Races."⁶ Bluford Adams has recently identified a set of "regional pluralists" in late-nineteenth-century New England who sought to portray that region as shaped in part by the contributions of groups other than English settlers, although these intellectuals focused primarily on a dual, Yankee-Irish heritage. Kathleen Conzen has discovered that some nineteenth-century German American intellectuals sought to carve out a place for their group in America through principled defenses of "permanent ethnic diversity."⁷ These works have spotlighted versions of pluralist thinking away from the national stage shared by Kallen and Bourne and sometimes at or very close to the grass roots. Beginning in the 1920s, for example, ethnic residents of Cleveland cooperated in the Cultural Gardens movement, which celebrated their city's many immigrant heritages.⁸	7
All of this suggests some broader ways of approaching the history of cultural pluralism as an ideology. First, while never losing sight of what one might call "high pluralism"—that is, systematic theories of pluralism worked out by intellectuals, especially those within the academy—historians should also attend to what I would term "vernacular pluralism," or pluralist views articulated at a more popular, grassroots level. Such vernacular pluralisms could surface in cultural productions such as ethnic festivals, historical commemorations, and local histories; in political mobilizations by or on behalf of outsider groups; and in such groups' internal debates about their place in society. These vernacular versions did not generally express formal theories of pluralism in a social scientific sense, but they did convey understandings of society as legitimately composed of enduring groups, including ethnic groups. They also could and often did represent the work of intellectuals broadly understood, including the authors of local histories or participants in immigrant debates.⁹ In this regard, we should likewise consider the extent to which "high" and "vernacular" pluralisms influenced and blurred into one another.	8
Second, we should extend our consideration of both high and vernacular pluralisms to the period before the 1910s. This might or might not unearth a longer genealogy of cultural pluralism, in the sense of revealing direct lines of influence from earlier manifestations to, say, Kallen's ideas. But it would, I argue, put those ideas in perspective by showing that notions of ethnic pluralism were canvassed earlier and more widely than we have thought. Such notions were undoubtedly minority views compared to ideologies of nativism and immigrant assimilation, and they likely accepted hierarchies of color. Nonetheless, their very existence challenges the view that Americans before the 1910s thought only in terms of exclusion or ultimate assimilation—whether through Anglo-conformity or melting-pot fusion—when it came to immigrants.	9
These considerations bring us back to Marion Learned. For his case opens a window, not only onto ethnic pluralist thinking before the 1910s, but also onto the dynamics of its creation, showing how vernacular pluralisms could emerge from particular ethnic groups and local historical understandings to help foster an early type of high pluralism. Learned's 1903 address to the Lebanon County Historical Society was not an aberration. Rather, it articulated a coherent and evolving pluralist vision of Pennsylvania and the nation. At its most developed, Learned's pluralism cast the American people as an "ethnic composite" that, while changing over time, organically linked different "race elements" together without absorbing or obliterating them. He proposed that this composite could serve as both an object of social scientific study and a model to the rest of the world of how "racial harmony" might be achieved. Significantly, this vision drew on two vernacular pluralist traditions dating from the nineteenth century: an immigrant one, crafted in particular by German Americans, that stressed the cultural value of ethnic persistence, and a local, mainstream one grounded in an understanding of Pennsylvania as historically diverse. This latter tradition, which I call Pennsylvania pluralism, depicted the commonwealth as founded by at least three colonial immigrant groups—the English, Scots Irish, and Germans—and, in some cases, as continuing to draw strength from those and more recent "racial elements." Pennsylvania pluralism was expressed and popularized by local intellectuals through a raft of state, county, and ethnic histories. Learned could bridge that tradition and the immigrant one because he was deeply involved in both German American activist networks and Pennsylvania's mainstream historical establishment.	10
This article begins by examining the vernacular pluralisms of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Pennsylvania, as articulated by immigrant and "old stock" intellectuals, many of whom shared institutional ties. It then focuses on Learned's pluralist thinking as it evolved through his early studies of the Pennsylvania German dialect; his long tenure as chair of the German Department at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia; his ambitious research program; and what we would call his public history efforts, which ensured a larger audience for some of his views. In certain respects, those views anticipated the high pluralism of the 1910s, especially Bourne's. Yet Learned's message was hindered by external and internal limits. Pluralist ideologies likely always faced an uphill battle in Pennsylvania against assimilationist assumptions and strains of nativism. Learned's high pluralist vision, moreover, was blinkered not just by Eurocentrism, but also by a preference for German culture, despite his sympathy for the newest European immigrants and his own lobbying against immigration restriction.	11
Nonetheless, the case of Learned and of Pennsylvania's pluralisms more generally has far greater than local significance. This case suggests that accounts of cultural pluralism's creation that focus on the national level—specifically, on Kallen's and Bourne's publications of 1915 and 1916, respectively—have missed a range of earlier pluralist ideologies that operated within immigrant groups and at the regional level in historically diverse regions like the mid-Atlantic. The variety, complexity, and ubiquity of pluralist notions in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Pennsylvania underscore the need for historians to probe for similar early pluralisms in other such regions, notably the upper Midwest and the Southwest.	12
Whether such ideologies exerted a direct influence on the high pluralisms of the 1910s is likewise a question for further research. Yet the Pennsylvania case also suggests an alternative reading of the history of ethnic pluralism before and during the 1910s, one less concerned with genealogy than with the conditions of pluralism's creation. If historically diverse regions proved hothouses for the repeated and possibly independent emergence of pluralist notions, then the writings of Kallen and Bourne begin to look less like the genesis of cultural pluralism and more like its most successful—because nationally recognized—early incarnation. Here, taking vernacular as well as high pluralism seriously allows us to see Kallen and Bourne's creation, as important as it was, as part of a larger, older, and ongoing pattern of pluralist thought in America.	13

PEOPLES OF PENNSYLVANIA
The notion of Pennsylvania as, at its historical roots, a pluralistic society is a commonplace of professional scholarship as well as of popular memory today. That hardly seems surprising, given the raw fact of colonial Pennsylvania's religious, racial, and ethnic diversity. Recent historiography has given us a rich and complex portrait of a province teeming with English and Welsh Quakers, Scots Irish Presbyterians, French Huguenots, a variety of German Protestants, Swedish and Dutch settlers, and numerous other immigrant groups. This was a colony dotted with rural ethnic concentrations and riven by religious, class, and racial tensions involving, among others, enslaved Africans and European indentured servants put to labor and Indians struggling to hold on to their land.¹⁰ Nineteenth-century Pennsylvania retained the impress of colonial-era diversity, even as its population diversified further through mass arrivals of Germans, Irish Catholics, and, toward the end of the century, Italians, Poles, Russian Jews, and other southern and eastern Europeans. Many descendants of colonial German settlers, in particular, crafted a distinct "Pennsylvania German" culture in southeastern and central counties of the state.¹¹ Public history endeavors have taken this pluralistic past as a central theme. During the 1990s, for example, Philadelphia's Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies featured an exhibit that interpreted the history of the state in terms of its ethnic and racial groups under the title, "Discovering America: The Peopling of Pennsylvania."¹²	14
Yet popular depictions of Pennsylvania history as the creation of assorted peoples—what one might call the "peoples of Pennsylvania" trope—long predated the 1990s. That trope figured in "ethnic studies" initiatives in Pennsylvania classrooms of the 1970s and 1980s and in school and state-sponsored histories of the state in the 1940s. In 1933 it surfaced in a "Peoples of Pennsylvania" high school pageant held in Altoona.¹³ And, remarkably, a version of it was a standard element of the Pennsylvania past described in popular state histories, county histories, and school textbooks in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Such cultural productions routinely cast colonial Pennsylvania as the creation of a set of distinct European immigrant groups. One of the most popular of the general-audience histories, Sydney Fisher's The Making of Pennsylvania, put it this way in 1896: Most of the English Colonies in America were founded by people of pure Anglo-Saxon stock.... But Pennsylvania was altogether different, and no other colony had such a mixture of languages, nationalities, and religions. Dutch, Swedes, English, Germans, Scotch-Irish, Welsh; Quakers, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Reformed, Mennonites, Tunkers, and Moravians, all had a share in creating it.¹⁴ Such accounts frequently set this "mixture" within a particular founding narrative. The founding groups were never less than three, these almost always being English Quakers, Protestant Germans, and Scots Irish Presbyterians.¹⁵ Immigrant groups were described in terms of what we would call ethnicity—that is, "nationality" or "race"—religious denomination, or perhaps most frequently, both at once. And many of these accounts saw their story as beginning in earnest with the arrival of the "great founder," the Quaker William Penn, in the 1680s.¹⁶ County histories in particular—a spate of which appeared in the 1880s—could cast Penn as intending the creation of "an asylum for the oppressed ... of all nations." The promise of that refuge, based in religious toleration and freedom of conscience, in turn helped draw what one history called early Pennsylvania's "diversity of nationalities." This portrayal of Pennsylvania as an immigrant asylum seems to have been a localized variation of nineteenth-century depictions of America as a haven for Europe's oppressed.¹⁷	15
These accounts' acknowledgement of early "diversity" had distinct limits. The author of one 1884 county history portrayed Pennsylvania's settlement as an extension of the Reformation, foreclosing any role for the colony's small number of Catholics.¹⁸ More common was the assumption that Pennsylvanian meant "white." When Samuel Pennypacker proclaimed in his popular 1914 history that "many races contributed to [Pennsylvania's] people," he was not thinking past color lines, for his words came directly under the heading, "Race Stocks of the White Settlers." Most if not all state and county histories treated Pennsylvania's colonial past as a story of European settlement. The "polyglot province of Pennsylvania" was framed in opposition to Indian "savages," despite nods to initially peaceful Quaker-Lenape relations.¹⁹	16
Within such Eurocentric bounds, however, diversity frequently was accepted and at times celebrated as a formative influence on early Pennsylvania. This may seem unlikely, given that many of the authors of these works, like Fisher and Pennypacker, were gentlemen amateurs with colonial ancestors and ties to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (HSP). Founded in the 1820s by men from upper-class Philadelphia families, the HSP emerged as the city's flagship historical association. Gary Nash has depicted its late-nineteenth-century leaders as conservatives fixated on an allegedly more stable colonial past and as, at best, uninterested in the immigrants of their day.²⁰ Yet what one of these authors in 1870 called the "diversity, arising from their different nationalities," of colonial settlers, was so basic a historical reality that it was all but unavoidable. County histories at times conveyed acceptance of this fact in their organization. Not infrequently, their early chapter headings were organized by ethnic and racial group; one chapter titled "Nationalities" carried the subheadings "Swedes-Germans-English-Welsh-Irish-Hebrews-Negroes."²¹ Public historical commemorations could put a similar ethnic sequence on parade, as in a 1908 pageant that marked Philadelphia's founding with marching detachments of "Lenni Lenape Indians," "Early Dutch Settlers," "Welsh who followed Penn," "German Mystics and Pietists," and "The Scotch-Irish."²² Some authors went beyond acceptance to praise. J. Thomas Scharf and Thompson Westcott wrote in their 1884 history of Philadelphia that colonial Pennsylvania's "heterogeneous population" saved it from "falling into the grooves of a dead and dull uniformity."²³	17
Importantly, a subset of these historians viewed Pennsylvania's present, as well as its past, in pluralist terms.²⁴ These scholars, who included both emerging professional historians and amateurs, had at least two things in common. First, at a minimum, they acknowledged ethnic diversity as a continuing element of Pennsylvania life without treating it as a detriment. Second, most either had origins in, or close connections with, non-English ethnic groups, whether of colonial or more recent immigrant vintage. At the same time, many shared scholarly networks that connected them to "mainstream" historical organizations, especially the HSP.	18
While these scholars portrayed the Pennsylvania of their own time in terms of group life, a good number did so primarily by recognizing the persistence of colonial-era European ethnic groups. Yet such declarations—particularly from authors of Scots Irish or Pennsylvania German background—could yield strong affirmations of nineteenth-century Pennsylvania as pluralistic. George Chambers, a descendant of Scots Irish Presbyterians, argued in 1856 that the three founding "classes" of "the English, the Scots and Irish, and the Germans" had experienced a "separation" that was "maintained unbroken for some generations, and is not even yet effaced." He had kind words for the virtues of all three groups, as well as for "the respectable families of emigrants, who are in these days coming to our land." Chambers's words, in turn, were echoed—if not outright lifted—by another Presbyterian, J. Smith Futhey, in an 1870 address commemorating the 150th anniversary of his church in Chester County, just west of Philadelphia. Futhey pointed out the "singular fact that the white races in Pennsylvania"—the English, Germans, and Scots Irish—"are remarkably unmixed, and retain their original character beyond that of any state in the Union." These words then made their way into the History of Chester County that Futhey coauthored in 1881 with Gilbert Cope, an HSP member like Futhey. Chester County, this volume declared, "was settled by these three distinctly-marked races, and their peculiarities are seen in their descendants at the present day, and are readily recognizable by those familiar with them."²⁵	19
Perhaps the most striking among such early declarations of pluralism emerged in the Penn Monthly, a literary magazine largely written by University of Pennsylvania faculty and alumni and edited from 1870 until 1880 by Robert Ellis Thompson. Born in Northern Ireland, Thompson immigrated to the United States at the age of thirteen and became a Presbyterian minister before joining the Penn faculty in 1868. Despite his Ulster Presbyterian origins, he was a moderate Irish nationalist, championing Irish independence as a longtime columnist for the Irish World.²⁶ He also wrote on the history of Scots Irish and German immigration to colonial Pennsylvania; compared notes with Pennypacker on Pennsylvania German history; and had ties to the HSP, delivering at least two addresses there.²⁷ Thompson's background may help to explain "The Race or the Hybrid," which appeared in the Penn Monthly in 1872 under the name of John Dyer. Dyer declared that "the union of different races without their blending, is the chief source of the strength of a composite nation. Ours is such a nation," he continued, "and most persons have very little idea of the distinctness with which different nationalities have kept up their old boundary lines. In Pennsylvania, for instance, the German element never mingled with the Scotch-Irish or the English elements," and more recent immigrants showed the same tendency. Dyer held that the "manifold types of national character that coexist in the United States ... are gradually fusing into political unity." Fortunately, however, political unity did not require erasing differences between "types of mind character." Indeed, "To take away the variety and the individuality of type out of the nation's life is not to strengthen the natural unity, but the reverse," Dyer argued. The "chief danger" was that such differences would be "obliterated and forgotten" by "assimilation"—"all our tendencies are in that direction."²⁸	20
One reason Thompson may have been willing to run Dyer's article is the strong possibility that Dyer was, in fact, Thompson, writing under a pen name. Dyer's piece echoed, in argument and language, an 1870 article by Thompson that insisted on the persistence of differences of "race" within England's population. "Where different races work together in harmony, each ... contributes to the common strength and stability of the whole, even when no bond of marriage unites them," Thompson wrote of England. "So in the American nation. It is not the promiscuous commingling, but the harmonious union of distinct national and race elements, which will develop in the highest degree the strength of each for the common benefit of all."²⁹ Whatever Dyer's identity, he—and thus, perhaps, Thompson—drew on a particular understanding of Pennsylvania's past, as well as a view of America's ethnic present, to bolster a full-fledged argument for the worth of continued ethnic diversity.	21
Historians of Pennsylvania German background could be just as celebratory of diversity, which they often evoked through textile metaphors. Scharf and Westcott had portrayed early Pennsylvania as a kind of ethnic loom: upon a "warp of simple and ingenuous Swedish peasants and farmers ... was woven a parti-colored woof of many nationalities, sects, opinions, and habits." Frank Ried Diffenderffer offered a similar figure of speech in an 1898 address to the HSP explaining the nature of the "truly cosmopolitan province" created by Swedish, Dutch, English, Scots Irish, French, and German settlers: "Into the warp and woof of our political and social fabric have been harmoniously woven the personalities of many nations." HSP president Samuel Pennypacker summed up the contribution of "many races" to colonial Pennsylvania's people this way: "Numerous fibers were twisted into a cord, which grew strong." Such metaphors acknowledged, approvingly, the continuing integrity of ethnic threads within a larger framework of pluralistic coexistence. Yet they could have limits. Diffenderffer, for example, tended to ascribe Pennsylvania's greatness above all to a partnership between the English and colonial-era "Palatine" Germans. He also expressed relief that Pennsylvania was not too diverse, that "it did not remain or become a land of many nationalities and peoples, like Austria, each jealous of its own language and customs and determined to adhere to them." Rather, its immigrants had demonstrated their unswerving political "loyalty to the dearer land of their adoption."³⁰ In contrast, some other Pennsylvania German county historians were concerned to see "our Pennsylvania German people, as a people" among "people of other nationalities," and one that seemed to be hanging onto its dialect and identity.³¹	22

IMMIGRANTS AND A "STILL-DEVELOPING PEOPLE"
The self-characterization of Pennsylvania Germans as one nationality among many was of a piece with the larger "invention of ethnicity" in nineteenth-century America—the process by which different ethnic groups ushered in ethnicity or "nationality" as a widely canvassed social category. Kathleen Conzen and colleagues have described how German immigrants aided this effort through arguments designed to make a place for their culture in the United States. One depicted Germans as ultimately contributing cultural gifts to a new but evolving American type. This vision aligned with what John Higham called a "cosmopolitan and democratic ideal of nationality" held by many nineteenth-century Anglo-Americans, one that competed with long-standing notions that immigrants should conform to Anglo-American ways. The cosmopolitan ideal, which ultimately acquired the label of the "melting pot," cast Americans as a "mixed and still developing people" headed for an ultimate, unified fusion. Like the concept of America as asylum—with which it ran in tandem—this view had roots in the Revolutionary period, when J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur described America as melting different nationalities into "a new race of men." A German proviso, however, declared that Germans had a right to maintain a separate ethnic existence in order to preserve the gifts to be contributed. Since the group might take a long time to make its contribution, this argument easily slipped into a defense of continued ethnic diversity. A second German American argument was an outright defense of permanent diversity, where groups would maintain their own cultures into the indefinite future, united only by their membership in a common American political system.³²	23
The first, contributionist argument manifested itself in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Pennsylvania, not only among German American intellectuals, but within the mainstream historical establishment. A key figure here was Oswald Seidensticker, a German immigrant who became a professor of German at the University of Pennsylvania and studied German immigration in colonial Pennsylvania. Seidensticker anchored himself firmly in both German American and Anglo-American scholarly circles. He served as librarian of Philadelphia's leading immigrant German association, the German Society of Pennsylvania, and in 1880 founded a society to encourage German American historical research while also sitting, for two decades, on the HSP's Council. He wrote and lectured extensively on his subject in German and English, speaking at times to HSP audiences and publishing in Thompson's Penn Monthly. Seidensticker likewise maintained a bicultural network of informal contacts with, among others, Pennypacker and the immigrant German historian, H. A. Ratterman of Cincinnati.³³	24
Seidensticker elaborated his contributionist viewpoint in one of his best-known works, which cast the settlement of Germantown, Pennsylvania, as the onset of German migration to America. Published in German in 1883, The First German Immigration to America and the Founding of Germantown in 1683 rehearsed what was by then a standard argument within German America. It was inevitable that the "German element" would assimilate itself to the American, Seidensticker wrote, yet this would not necessarily sacrifice "national character." Indeed, "the German" could bring his outlooks on life to bear on the republic, for "the Americans are a still-developing people [ein werdendes Volk] and by their fusion with the great German population element get as good as they give." This in turn spelled a duty to the "better" German elements to guard "the treasure of their good spiritual and moral qualities" and preserve the German language within the family. The "characteristic traits" to be thus guarded and conveyed were cultural, such as German sociability and the kindergarten. This, in other words, was a recipe for ethnic cultural maintenance. Seidensticker implied that it extended to non-German groups when he approvingly quoted the observation that the "national characteristics" of the future United States would be, among other traits, "German diligence," "Anglo-Saxon energy," and "Celtic fantasy." And, it turned out, Germans, or at least some Germans, apparently would have quite some time yet to cultivate their ethnic traits, for "centuries of German-American life still lie veiled before us."³⁴	25
Whether Seidensticker ever conveyed this argument in full to his English-speaking audiences is unclear, although he did tell an 1877 HSP gathering that colonial German immigration had given "to the population of our State features of a peculiar mould." Contributionist stances gained a new platform, however, with the founding in Philadelphia of the National German-American Alliance in 1901. The National Alliance grew into one of the largest ethnic organizations in American history before its demise in 1918. Its Philadelphia-based leadership aimed above all at the preservation of the cultural and institutional "Germandom" of nineteenth-century immigrants. To this end, Alliance activists resorted to the contributionist argument and—despite their faith in the superiority of German culture—found themselves stressing its applicability to multiple immigrant "races." For H. M. Ferren, an Alliance activist from western Pennsylvania, real Americanization was "a gradual assimilating process, allowing each constituent part of our heterogeneous population ample time and opportunity to contribute its share of what is typically strong and good." As he wrote in 1903, "the composite nature of the American people makes it imperative that other forces besides those of English origin should become more than nominally operative in our national organism." German Americans had the "double task" of maintaining themselves "in their singularity" and instilling "as much as possible of this singularity in the American people," Alliance secretary Adolph Timm argued the same year. That American people, Timm explained, was an "unparalleled ... mixture of peoples": the United States was bringing together "the Germanic, Latin, and Slavic races." This, however, resulted in "a people living side by side"—apparently, a people of coexisting races—since very little mixing of "blood" occurred. Alliance president Charles J. Hexamer, like Timm a Philadelphian, likewise stated in 1905 that "members of all races" had a duty "to impart to us that which is best in the cultural development of their race," since the American nation was "still in a formative period." That this argument served Alliance interests did not vitiate its pluralist nature. Such ethnic commitments remained a common starting point for later pluralist thinkers, including Kallen, a committed Zionist. As Higham observed, pluralists generally identified with and wrote on behalf of a particular "social minority."³⁵	26

MARION DEXTER LEARNED AND THE "HARMONY OF RACES"
It would fall to Seidensticker's successor at the University of Pennsylvania, Marion Dexter Learned, to weave these immigrant and regional vernacular traditions into a high pluralist vision that clearly anticipated the cultural pluralism of the 1910s. Learned was born in Delaware in 1857, into a family whose English and Welsh ancestors immigrated to Massachusetts and Maryland in the seventeenth century. He graduated from Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 1880, and then taught school in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, where he became interested in Pennsylvania Germans and their language. By 1884 Learned had begun work on a linguistic study of the Pennsylvania German dialect that would become his doctoral dissertation. He studied in Germany and took his PhD in German at Johns Hopkins in 1887. He taught at that university until 1895, when Penn named him to fill the position left vacant by Seidensticker's death the previous year. Learned remained as head of Penn's Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures until his death in 1917.³⁶	27
From the beginning, Learned's interest in Pennsylvania German life was not just linguistic but also historical and what he called "ethnographical." This seems to have drawn him toward such scholarly topics as Pennsylvania history and historical and contemporary ethnic life. A member and, in 1909, president of the Modern Language Association, he also joined the American Historical Association; the HSP; and the Pennsylvania History Club, an HSP-affiliated scholars' group. At the same time, Learned followed the culture of contemporary German immigrants and became heavily involved in German American ethnic activism, serving as a delegate at the 1901 founding convention of the National Alliance and as an Alliance vice president. These interests came together in the German American Historical Society, which Learned, other scholars, and Alliance activists including Hexamer and Timm founded in 1901, and in the Society's journal, German American Annals, which Learned edited.³⁷	28
Working outward from his focus on Pennsylvania German and immigrant German affairs, Learned gradually came to a larger, pluralist view of the past, present, and future of Pennsylvania and the nation—one that combined notions of social evolution, a sophisticated approach to the study of ethnic relations, and a normative vision of those relations. In the 1880s Learned still thought in assimilationist terms. He predicted that the Pennsylvania German dialect would vanish within "a few generations" and, in good Teutonist fashion, appeared to see America as fusing the racially related English and Germans into one. Yet he had also noticed contemporary Pennsylvania's diversity, "the most varied commingling of nationalities," from English, Irish, and German to the recent "promiscuous influx of Hungarians, Italians and what not."³⁸	29
Learned's writings from the 1890s suggest he was working toward an understanding of the United States as fundamentally a bicultural nation, with English and German culture either combining or coexisting. In 1896 he described the founding of Pennsylvania as "the establishment of an Anglo-German commonwealth in America." Two years later, in a speech to a German American teacher's association, he addressed America as such. "Notwithstanding the composite racial character of the American people, the preponderating element in our civilization ... must continue to be English," Learned announced, denoting as "English" both the "national speech" and the "impulse toward all forms of liberty." Yet that political liberty had made for cultural freedom: "No form of culture has been allowed to tyrannize the American people," so that the republic was "free and ready ... to adopt those elements of civilization and progress, which will best promote the national development." Like other contemporary observers, Learned recognized that the children of German immigrants were abandoning the German language and German American associational life. His solution was to press the value of German high culture. The second generation should be taught to prize "German literature and speech-culture," so that they could unite "with this heirloom the best of Anglo-American culture."³⁹ Under "English" political liberty, the American future could and should bring together German and Anglo-American culture without effacing either.	30
Over the next few years, this initially bicultural message would become more concrete and more inclusive of other European immigrant groups. Learned signaled the change in his 1903 Lebanon address, which he titled "The Pennsylvania German and His English and Scotch Irish Neighbors." In this speech, Learned stepped beyond literature to explore Pennsylvania's ethnic relations more broadly, in terms of history and multiple groups. He reviewed the diverse "origin of early settlers" in Lebanon County and beyond, touching on the "nationalities" of Welsh Quakers, the Scots Irish, and a group of Jewish settlers, as well as the Germans. He explored nineteenth-century interactions among such groups and suggested that this diversity continued and intensified from the past into the present. Moreover, it was sheltered under a common political umbrella that covered more groups than the two mentioned in his 1898 speech—including Hungarians, Italians, and other southeastern Europeans. "Here may be heard the vernacular of scores of races whose hearts throb in unison with the National American anthem and whose pride rests in the generation now rising under the protection of the stars and stripes."⁴⁰	31
Learned made his most explicit pluralist statement the following year, however, on a national stage and in national terms. He spoke, in English, before a "Germanic Congress" organized under National Alliance auspices as part of the 1904 Universal Exposition in St. Louis. His speech bore the title, "The Harmony of Races in America and the Peace of Peoples."⁴¹ In it, Learned argued that the American people and nation was "an ethnic composite, a union of many race elements, and has been from its origin one steady process of evolution by the fusion of these heterogeneous elements." Although he cited Crèvecoeur's description of individuals melting into a new American "race," Learned did not appear to endorse that stance. Rather, he described a kind of "Americanization" that had a pluralist outcome: The process of Americanization ... is not one of assimilation, of conformation to any particular ethnic type[,] as English, for example.... Nor is it simply a process of amalgamation, a mixing of elements which in themselves may still have only a mechanical coherency in the mass. Americanization is rather an organic union, an intergrowth of race elements, an evolution by the processes of natural affinity and social and political selection. This evolutionary process had occurred in three stages. The first, or "colonial" stage, involved attempts by different European nations to found "race colonies" in America, and certain institutions imported during that period persisted until the present. "The province of Pennsylvania[,] for example[,] remains to this day what it was before the Revolution[,] a complex of united ethnic elements in which the English and German are the dominant." The second, or "national" stage, involved subordinating clashing interests between the new states to the larger interests of the nation, a process that included the Civil War.⁴²	32
The final, "international" stage began with the emergence of the United States as a world power. The globe was now marked by international rivalries, ethnic reawakenings, and pan-Slavic, pan-German, and other panethnic movements. In such a world, "the harmonious evolution of the ethnic element or elements [in a nation] is the condition of a nation's existence." Here, the United States faced a crossroads. It "may become the brooding place of race hostilities already hundreds of years old in the countries of Europe, or it may become the model ethnic school, where the feuds and jealousies of the old world shall ... give place to racial harmony and international brotherhood."⁴³ Indeed, the fullest reconciliation on the basis of good feeling and ethnic harmony is only possible in nation[s] like our own[,] the United States.... Here[,] the process of race amalgamation—I do not wish to say race-assimilation—has been going on for two hundred year[s]. And it is here, if anywhere, that the solutions of the political and ethnic problems of the world must be solved [sic], not alone in miniature[,] as ... issues within our nation itself, but in a large universal sense as interethnic and international problems.⁴⁴	33
Those solutions, Learned continued, must be found through "scientific inquiry" into "these race elements ... their number and relative cultural strength" over two hundred years of American history. "Let [us] discover the virtues and vices of the several ethnic contingents rushing to our shores." Learned implied that this could involve coercion: "Let us not forget that our ability to control these great masses of aliens will be conditioned upon our exact knowledge of the ethnic constituency of the nation as a whole." But he also held that "sober scientific inquiry" could and should displace "national hatred, jingoism, nativism in its varied forms." "It is time for the American to learn that his ... nation['s] existence is dependent upon the foreign element," Learned stressed. "We are a composite people and must remain such."⁴⁵	34
The heart of Learned's pluralism in this remarkable speech lay in his understanding of Americanization as an ongoing "intergrowth of race elements." Those elements became interconnected organically over time, and they might undergo some change; a "fusion of race elements" in the colonies had helped to create "those provincial characteristics" that distinguished some American regions from others. Yet, as Pennsylvania's experience showed, the English, German, and other ethnic elements themselves did not go away. They retained much, if not most, of their integrity, even as they developed organic ties to one another to form the larger "composite." Learned suggested as much when he referred to contemporary German Americans as one such "race element." For he certainly viewed that element, despite second-generation losses, as distinct and institutionally robust, particularly in terms of its ethnic associations. After all, the National Alliance—as he described it in 1912—was a national organization of such associations.⁴⁶ Learned's "composite people" of 1904 thus was not fusing into one homogeneous mass. Rather, it consisted of overlapping and yet substantially distinct "race elements," and its most promising future lay in serving as an example to the world that such "races" could live together in harmony. Learned, in other words, foresaw—indeed, hoped for—a future of continued ethnic diversity.	35
At this fundamental level, and in the sophistication of his approach, Learned anticipated the high "cultural pluralism" expounded a decade later by Horace Kallen and Randolph Bourne, even as aspects of his vision differed from theirs. Kallen and Bourne grounded their pluralist visions in a political metaphor of federation. Bourne's 1916 essay, "Trans-National America," saw the United States as turning into a "federation of cultures." Kallen's article of the previous year, "Democracy Versus the Melting-Pot," similarly depicted America as becoming "a federation or commonwealth of nationalities." Those nationalities would share a common political and economic system that would allow each to cultivate its cultural distinctiveness separately. Learned did not discount a common political framework. He had incorporated that idea in his lectures of 1898 and 1903, and his 1904 speech implied it in describing German political support for the Union during the Civil War. But his chosen metaphors of evolution and intergrowth were far more open than Kallen's to recognizing other connections and overlaps among "race elements" and the ways these could change over time. In this as in other aspects of his thinking, Learned stood closer to Bourne. Bourne's "federated ideal" was more fluid than Kallen's and at times sounded like Learned's account of organic intergrowth. Europe's "colonies live here inextricably mingled, yet not homogeneous," Bourne wrote. "They merge but they do not fuse." And Learned's vision of America as the "model ethnic school" directly anticipated Bourne's articulation of America as "the first international nation," the country that had achieved "the peaceful living side by side ... of the most heterogeneous peoples under the sun."⁴⁷	36

LEARNED'S PLURALISM: ROOTS, REACH, AND LIMITS
What, then, were the sources of the pluralist ideas Learned articulated in 1903 and 1904? His shift from a bicultural standpoint to one that considered multiple cultures likely had a proximate cause in a research venture he mentioned at Lebanon: the American Ethnographical Survey. This project had its origins in Learned's dissertation research, which uncovered distinct dialect territories of Pennsylvania German. His interest in these "speech islands" had grown by the late 1890s to encompass "other cultural survivals," including those of German, Dutch, Swedish, and Welsh settlers. Learned began publishing questionnaires requesting "ethnographical data" about these groups. In 1902 he widened the scope of this effort dramatically by proposing an "ethnographical survey" of the United States. This "culture census," by treating "each race element in its relation to others," would "show how the interaction of various ethnic types and forms of culture in our body politic and social has produced what we call the 'American' nation." From the start, the survey was meant to examine historically a series of colonial and nineteenth-century immigrant groups in the mid-Atlantic and the Mississippi Valley, as well as "the later immigrations" of Hungarians, Italians, and "other races." Ultimately, Learned envisioned a "race census" that would canvass the United States to discern "the ethnical distribution and cultural characteristics of the population as it now exists."⁴⁸	37
In practice, the survey never reached these rather staggering national dimensions, which Learned outlined at the April 1902 general meeting of the American Philosophical Society. The following month, however, an organizational meeting in Philadelphia approved the survey concept and a pilot "expedition" for the coming summer focusing on areas of colonial German settlement in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. This "Conestoga Expedition" functioned both as a "'dragnet'" for historical documents and a sociological survey, including a house-to-house canvass in one township that asked after families' ethnic origins, traditions, and use of Pennsylvania German. Significantly, the meeting behind it attracted not only academics and HSP officers, but also representatives of "the various race societies" of Philadelphia and the state, including the National Alliance, the Pennsylvania German Society, the Welsh Society, and the Hebrew Association.⁴⁹ Learned had recruited a base of support for his project that extended beyond his immediate German circle to other ethnic groups. This step may have pushed him to think in the multiple-group terms so evident in his addresses of 1903 and 1904.	38
More broadly, however, Learned's statements after 1902 appear to have drawn from and sharpened the vernacular pluralist notions already worked out by local historians and German American intellectuals. His 1903 Lebanon address clearly reflected ideas of colonial Pennsylvania as an asylum that attracted a set of founding immigrant groups—themes sounded for years by county and state historians. Learned's stress, in Lebanon and St. Louis, on Pennsylvania's continuing diversity likewise echoed the stance taken by a subset of those historians, such as Futhey, Dyer, and Diffenderfer. And Dyer, too, had hailed a "composite" American nation that brought "races" together without blending them. Moreover, Learned was aware of many of these historians, in part because he was firmly planted in their scholarly networks. He knew of "all of this good work, which the county historical societies are carrying on," as he told his Lebanon audience. He had worked as far back as the 1880s with H. L. Fisher and A. R. Horne, both of whom defended Pennsylvania German distinctiveness in county histories, and in a 1908 work thanked Futhey's coauthor, Gilbert Cope, for his "friendly assistance." Learned was on familiar terms with Diffenderffer and, especially, Pennypacker, whom he personally invited to the Ethnographical Survey's organizational meeting. These and other ties were reinforced by Learned's association with the HSP, which began with his dissertation research in the 1880s. They were only confirmed when Learned helped to inaugurate the HSP-affiliated Pennsylvania History Club in 1905. The meetings of this small group brought him together with a good number of the local and state historians cited above, including Cope, Sydney Fisher, and Isaac Sharpless.⁵⁰ The pluralistic Pennsylvania they depicted, as well as the one Learned had observed, became one model for Learned's "composite" American people.	39
A second intellectual taproot was an immigrant one that ran from German America. This source offered Learned models of the American people as an evolving composite that took in contributions from different ethnic groups without devouring them—indeed, that provided a measure of cultural freedom within political unity. His depiction of an intergrowth of "race elements" hinged on an assumption of change over time, one provided through the metaphor of evolution. In a post-Darwin age, Learned was hardly the first social thinker to use that metaphor, but he employed it to give this process a more open-ended nature than was offered by Crèvecoeur's image of "melting." At the same time, the notion that what evolved was a composite changed by contributions owed something to the idea of a "still-developing people" put forth by Seidensticker and continued by activists within the National Alliance. The contributionist theme came through clearly in Learned's 1903 speech and in his 1904 call for investigation into the "relative cultural strength" of particular "race elements" in American history. Indeed, one could interpret the American Ethnographical Survey as Learned's attempt to turn the German American contributionist idea into a social scientific hypothesis: the survey would investigate "what the influences of a given race element"—their contributions—actually were.⁵¹	40
Learned may very well have imbibed these notions directly from Seidensticker. He was keenly aware of being Seidensticker's successor, literally and as a student of Pennsylvania German culture. Seidensticker's work "is so fresh in the minds of those who followed it," Learned said in 1896, that one could best characterize it by listing the most important publications—which Learned then did, numbering among them The First German Immigration. If Learned did not read the contributionist description of the American people and defense of ethnic maintenance in that book, he could hardly have avoided hearing such ideas from National Alliance acquaintances like Ferren, Timm, and Hexamer (who himself had been deeply influenced by Seidensticker). Learned corresponded with Ferren in the 1890s and worked closely with him, Hexamer, and Timm on Alliance matters in the first years of the new century.⁵² Learned was on particularly familiar terms with Hexamer, a tie reflected in their later correspondence; in 1907, Hexamer praised Learned before the Alliance's biennial convention as "that most German of old-stock Americans."⁵³ Indeed, as editor of German American Annals, Learned published Ferren's and Timm's formulations of these ideas in 1903 and Hexamer's in 1905. Similarly, the Alliance may have served Learned as one conduit for German American conceptions of American liberty as guaranteeing freedom of cultural diversity. Alliance activists spent a great deal of time fighting political battles against prohibition, and they did so in the name of "personal liberty," which was understood as protecting the cultural value of German sociability. "Personal liberty" was a staple of Alliance rhetoric, one Learned could not have failed to hear or—in the pages of his journal—read. Such rhetoric did convey, however self-servingly, a pluralistic conception of ethnic groups cultivating distinct cultural values under a common political umbrella. And it suggested a corollary that jibed well with Learned's "composite" view—that the "American people" was, in fact, just such a collection of ethnic groups. Or, as a German-language newspaper editor declared in a 1906 letter to Learned, the Germans were one element "in this conglomerate of nations and races that calls itself 'American.'"⁵⁴	41
Learned's view of Pennsylvanians and Americans as a "composite people" is one he attempted to share with a broader public through his speeches and his promotion of the American Ethnographical Survey. The survey, in fact, informed the highest-profile public history effort of Learned's career: the Pennsylvania History Exhibit at the Jamestown Tercentennial Exposition of 1907, held in Hampton Roads, Virginia, to mark the founding of England's Jamestown colony. Learned incorporated "some of the ideas of the Survey" in this exhibit, which won state funding with the help of Pennypacker, then serving as Pennsylvania's governor. Learned and his codirector, the historian Albert Myers, viewed the display as a chance to "investigate the underlying social and economic forces of the Commonwealth, with special stress upon the complex ethnic character of the people." As they told one attendee, "'the purpose is to emphasize the part taken by the several race elements in the settlement and development of Pennsylvania.'" The "backbone" of the exhibit, which focused on colonial Pennsylvania, was a series of large wall maps showing the "location of the racial elements" from 1660 to 1750. Colors denoted ethnic majorities in given areas of the colony—blue for English, red for German, orange for Scots Irish, and so forth. Arranged chronologically, the maps, with accompanying historical artifacts and documents, conveyed an impression of a series of ethnic settlements: visitors started at an "Early Swedes on the Delaware" section and ended up at one on German Moravians. For the thousands who saw the Pennsylvania History Exhibit, the group nature of life in the colony would have been hard to miss.⁵⁵	42
The exhibit may have succeeded in promoting to a broader public a view already common among local historians: that of the state as ethnically diverse at its historical roots, as "the land of the Quaker, of the German, the Scotch-Irish, and the Welsh," in the words of the keynote speaker at the Exposition's "Pennsylvania Day." Yet that speaker could as easily imply that contemporary Pennsylvanians were homogeneous, a people representing "those qualities of race that have brought fame and glory to Anglo-Saxon civilization." Such comments hint that Learned's larger vision of continuing and future diversity in America ultimately found far less resonance with the public than did depictions of Pennsylvania's past as diverse. Partly, this was because much of his later work, like the exhibit, focused on the colonial period rather than the present; Learned's sharpest articulation of a pluralist vision came in 1904, in "The Harmony of Races." Even here, however, his message seems to have had a relatively limited reach. While that speech was reprinted in German-language venues, English-language newspapers in St. Louis and Philadelphia only noted that he had addressed the Germanic Congress. Emerging in part out of a German American milieu, aspects of Learned's pluralism may have had difficulty breaking through to an English-speaking public. At the same time, such a vision undoubtedly was blunted by an increasingly powerful brand of racial nativism that compared southeastern European "new immigrants" unfavorably to "old immigrants" who, like Pennsylvania's early settlers, came from northwestern Europe.⁵⁶	43
In a larger sense, and from today's vantage point, Learned's pluralism had distinct internal limits, some of which it shared with the cultural pluralism of Kallen and Bourne. To us, the most obvious such limit is Eurocentrism. "America is transplanted Europe," Bourne stated flatly; Kallen foresaw "the perfection of the coöperative harmonies of 'European civilization'" on American soil. Their assumption that European Americans were the Americans who counted is one that Learned shared. Indians ultimately were peripheral to his story of America. They had "left but faint traces on our new American culture and practically none on our institutions, which are essentially European," he declared in 1916. African Americans likewise stood on the margins. Learned certainly was aware of their long presence in Pennsylvania. He celebrated the written "Protest against Negro Slavery" lodged by four Germantown settlers in 1688 as an early German achievement, and he knew of W. E. B. Du Bois's research for the partly historical work, The Philadelphia Negro (1899). In fact, Learned had heard of Du Bois in 1897, while the latter was in the midst of fieldwork for the book as an "assistant in sociology" at Penn. The sociologist who hired Du Bois, Samuel Lindsay, initially had wanted the university to publish a preliminary report of Du Bois's findings, and Learned offered to assist in that process. If Learned ever read Du Bois's pluralist essay of that year, "The Conservation of Races," however, its message—of an America with room for "two or three great national ideals," one of them pursued by "the Negro race"—had little impact. Black Americans figured hardly at all in his calculus. The Conestoga Expedition, for example, did not examine fifteen families in its township canvass "for various reasons," one of these being that "three were negro families."⁵⁷	44
In contrast, Learned took a markedly inclusive view of "new immigrants" from southeastern Europe, a then-radical stance he shared with Kallen and Bourne. Writing in 1911 on "The Early German Immigrant and the Immigration Question of Today," Learned deemed it "scarcely conceivable" that contemporary immigrants were "greatly inferior to the masses of South Germans who came to America" in the eighteenth century. He not only opposed a literacy test for newcomers, a device restrictionists aimed squarely at southeastern Europeans, but spoke against it in a meeting with President Woodrow Wilson in 1915.⁵⁸	45
Yet Learned did betray some reservations that had roots in his 1904 call to measure immigrant contributions through "scientific inquiry." For such an inquiry implied those contributions were open to negative as well as positive judgments. At times, as in his 1911 article, Learned could find particular groups lacking when measured against modern "civilization." Here, he noted that "the process of assimilation is slow, and must be observed through long epochs"; indeed, "not uniformity but diversity is the prominent characteristic of our several communities." Not all diversity, however, was necessarily good: some "ethnic elements," including some Pennsylvania Germans, clung to "superstition." Nonetheless, many Germans "of the Colonial and later periods" had "assimilated or risen to their full civic privileges," among them, presumably, those advocates of ethnic cultural maintenance in the National Alliance. The immigrants of 1911 had similar promise as "a valuable national asset." But Learned also thought this newer diversity had to be managed. "How shall the inflowing mass of unpromising aliens be disposed of and assimilated?" he asked. He rejected the literacy test but endorsed some draconian measures of internal "control," including a government-mandated geographic "distribution" of immigrants that would forbid "the massing of aliens in the large seaboard cities."⁵⁹	46
Despite this evident nervousness about aspects of immigrant life, Learned saw contemporary newcomers as potential bearers of positive cultural contributions. Southern European immigrants might one day "bring us a new revival of the culture of Ancient Greece and Rome." Indeed, Learned may have worried that such currents could overtake German culture. Speaking, in German, before a German American audience in 1912, he declared that ensuring the continued use of a language other than English in America could pit German against other immigrant languages. Here, his identification with things German got the better of him: "We hold German ideals to be the highest and best, and if we want to preserve them, we must make an effort ... to spread German culture." Such preferences and reservations rendered Learned's pluralism more limited in its sympathies than Bourne's or Kallen's. Yet it is well to remember that even so sensitive an observer as Bourne could, like Learned, measure immigrants on scales of superior and "inferior civilizations" and yearn for "an integrated and disciplined America."⁶⁰	47
Learned lived just long enough to see his vision of a "composite people" repudiated by the nativist and anti-German backlash that accompanied World War I. His close identification with Germany and German America made it inevitable that the war years would deeply wound him. In a case of spectacularly bad timing, Learned had won authorization from the Penn trustees for an "Emperor William Institution of German American Research" and was soliciting funds for the project when the war broke out in 1914. Fund-raising in the name of Kaiser William, however, became increasingly quixotic as much of American public opinion turned against Germany and, starting in 1915, against "hyphenated" German Americans. The "anti-hyphenate" campaign of that year, pursued by such figures as Theodore Roosevelt, likewise attacked pluralist conceptions of the American nation—indeed, Bourne wrote "Trans-National America" partly in response to that campaign. President Wilson himself, speaking in Philadelphia in May 1915, rejected the view that Americans were a composite people. "America does not consist of groups," Wilson told an audience of newly naturalized citizens. "A man who thinks of himself as belonging to a particular national group in America has not yet become an American." The president's speech was only a foretaste of the conformist nationalism that would overtake the United States after American intervention, weakening "the pluralist character of pre-1917 America" and lasting, in some ways, until the 1960s, as Gary Gerstle has argued. In that sense, Learned's death on August 1, 1917 helped to mark the end of an era, one that had been more open to vernacular pluralisms.⁶¹	48
Why, then, did Marion Learned and his particular brand of pluralist thinking matter? One could argue that he was the exception that proves the rule—an isolated figure who attempted in vain to popularize a kind of pluralism that would only gain a measure of intellectual traction with the writings of Kallen and Bourne. Yet such a view would ignore the larger context within which Learned operated. Indeed, his story matters in part because it begins to illuminate that lost world—one of older, vernacular pluralisms based in immigrant debates about the nature of American society and in a local mainstream's understanding of local and state history.	49
First, Learned's career suggests not only that strains of American pluralist thinking predated the 1910s, but also that they were more complex and more widely canvassed than we have thought. There was a range of vernacular pluralisms in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Pennsylvania. The most popular celebrated the diversity of the province's founding European immigrant groups, but other versions recognized and at times lauded the state's continuing ethnic diversity, while immigrant strains in particular looked forward to that diversity's extension into the indefinite future. Learned's high pluralist synthesis, especially as expressed in 1903 and 1904, reflected all of these vernaculars. It suggested they could be mutually reinforcing, for German American notions of America as a "conglomerate" of nations and Americans as a "still-developing people" fit well with Learned's understanding of Pennsylvania life and history. To trace the emergence of that synthesis is to observe how vernacular pluralisms themselves could emerge, change over time, influence one another, and ultimately inform a social scientific theory of pluralism.	50
Second, the Pennsylvania case suggests where historians following the origins of American pluralist ideologies ought to look next. Kallen and Bourne have dominated accounts of early pluralism, in part because they brought pluralist thinking to a national audience by publishing in the Nation and the Atlantic Monthly—national, mass-circulation magazines that were sources visible and easily accessible to historians. Learned's pluralism broached some of the barriers that hemmed in immigrant and local mainstream versions, but he, too, remained partially confined within regional intellectual networks and the ethnic world represented by German-language publications. In a sense, that confinement kept Learned, the high pluralist, at the level of a local intellectual. But this, in turn, suggests that such arenas are exactly where historians should take their investigations of early pluralist ideologies. They should expand their gaze from the national to the regional level, specifically to regions, like the mid-Atlantic, that historically were diverse. And they should consider whether Learned and the vernacular pluralisms around him represented one variation of a phenomenon repeated elsewhere in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. Two regions in particular seem candidates for such attention: the upper Midwest and the Southwest.	51
By the late nineteenth century, the heavily immigrant cities of the upper Midwest and much of its countryside resembled an ethnic patchwork. There is evidence to suggest that at least some of the region's inhabitants responded to this landscape in vernacular pluralist ways. Whether or not settlement workers in Chicago embraced an early form of pluralism, some in the city's ethnic press apparently did. An 1891 editorial in Dziennik Chicagoski invoked the notion of "Free America" as a refuge for "the Irish, Poles, and all similarly oppressed nations." But, as in the German American formulation, this freedom was also cultural: it "does not mean giving up the faith, language, or traditions of the fathers." A Milwaukee English-language newspaper called in 1908 for school histories that gave "due importance to the parts borne by representatives of all the different races in the composite population of the United States." This sentiment was so close to the National Alliance's conception of a composite America that German American Annals reprinted it.⁶² Historians should pursue such popular pluralist understandings systematically, and they likewise should probe for the local intellectual networks that may have sustained such views. Wisconsin offers starting points in the careers of two intellectuals, Waldemar Ager and Reuben Thwaites. Ager, a Norwegian-born journalist, was penning full-fledged cultural pluralist arguments by the 1910s. As early as 1903, however, his Norwegian-language newspaper, Reform, could reprint a letter describing the American people as consisting "of a portion of all races under the sun."⁶³ Thwaites, the secretary of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin from 1887 until his death in 1913, was a leading popularizer of Wisconsin history. In 1908 he could congratulate "the immigrant" in Wisconsin for often bringing "from the Old World fruits of civilization that are of value to the New; in casting off the old political relations, he does not thereby free himself from the experiences, culture, and patriotic sentiments binding him to his forbears."⁶⁴ For both men, local settings—the region's Norwegian American community, Wisconsin's ethnic past—appear to have played crucial roles in shaping pluralist notions. We need to know more about the early development of the pluralist views voiced by figures like Ager and Thwaites, their intellectual circles, and whether those circles intersected.	52
The Southwest in this period, and specifically New Mexico, presented a different kind of ethnic landscape, one marked by deep divides among Indians, Spanish-speaking descendants of early settlers, and a growing influx of Anglo-Americans. A rich historiography has traced the declining position of Spanish-speaking nuevomexicanos during these years, the long battle for statehood—prolonged by congressional reluctance to admit a territory opponents deemed racially too "Mexican"—and the accompanying racial conflicts and formations, including the rise of "Hispano" and "Spanish-American" identities that denied old settlers' Mexican and Indian roots.⁶⁵ Perhaps the most interesting development here is what Chris Wilson has referred to as "the rise of a rhetoric of triculturalism." This stance cast New Mexico as composed of "three separate cultures living in harmony"—Hispanos, Indians, and Anglos. Triculturalism, as Wilson and others have pointed out, served to gloss over a good deal of New Mexican social reality, from power relations to racial mixing. Perhaps not surprisingly, a variety of elite actors had a hand in its creation, including Anglo and Hispano politicians, historians, tourism boosters, writers, and artists.⁶⁶ What requires further investigation, however, is the timing and nature of its emergence. Wilson describes it as a "formulaic invocation of politicians and regional writers by the 1930s," yet sees it as emergent during and before the 1910s; he identifies its earliest written expression in an 1883 history of the state. One would like to know more about the early development of triculturalism, the intellectual circles that elaborated it, its relation to the statehood campaign, and the degree to which nonelite New Mexicans shaped it. Of particular interest are its racial assumptions, including whether and when it moved beyond an early positioning of groups along a continuum of progress, with "Americans" in the vanguard.⁶⁷	53
The promise and the unanswered questions of the Wisconsin and New Mexico cases suggest the need for much more historical spadework if we are to uncover the full extent of early vernacular pluralisms in different regions. Beyond the reconstruction of such regional pluralisms, however, lie further questions of influences and connections. Did ties among local pluralist intellectuals cross regions? Thwaites, for example, endorsed Learned's call for the Pennsylvania History Exhibit and lent materials for that display:⁶⁸ One wonders if he knew of Learned's composite vision. The more challenging question may be whether Kallen and Bourne were influenced by regional pluralisms. I have yet to find any evidence that either was aware of Learned or his writings. Wisconsin, on the other hand, presents the most interesting questions. For Kallen spent most of the 1910s there, teaching at the University of Wisconsin and, in Higham's words, "enjoying the ethos of a state rich in minorities." Bourne visited the state in 1915 and 1917 and in "Trans-National America" invoked it as a model. In Wisconsin and Minnesota, "strong foreign cultures have struck root in a new and fertile soil," remaining "distinct but cooperating," he wrote.⁶⁹ Any investigation of vernacular pluralism in Wisconsin should consider whether either figure drew on it.	54
Such questions of ultimate influence on the best-known articulators of cultural pluralism are beguiling. Yet even negative answers to those questions would still tell us something important about the nature of early cultural pluralism. The broader search for different regional pluralisms suggested by the Pennsylvania case would, in that event, reveal the degree to which pluralist notions cropped up independently and repeatedly in different parts of the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.⁷⁰ In this model, local conditions of historic diversity encouraged the emergence of vernacular pluralisms; in Learned's case, at least, such notions ultimately contributed to a kind of high pluralism. Viewed in this light, Kallen and Bourne look less like the inventors of cultural pluralism than its most successful early exponents—successful especially in gaining a national audience. Learned's case is one piece of evidence that suggests they should be seen as part of a larger pattern of American pluralist thought, one that took in the vernacular as well as the social scientific, the local and regional as well as the national, before and during the 1910s.	55
NOTES For their careful reading and critical comments, I would like to thank John Bukowczyk, Gary Gerstle, Deborah Gesensway, Franca Iacovetta, Matthew Jacobson, Ian Radforth, and two anonymous readers for the Journal of American Ethnic History. I presented earlier versions of this essay at the 2006 Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association and the Rockefeller Fellows Symposium of the Center for Ethnicities, Communities, and Social Policy at Bryn Mawr College in October 2005. My thanks to the participants and audiences at those sessions for their suggestions, as well as to the students in my University of Toronto graduate seminar on pluralism, who graciously read the article in manuscript. The research for and writing of this essay were supported by grants from the Connaught Fund of the University of Toronto, a Visiting Research Fellowship jointly sponsored by the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, a Rockefeller Foundation Resident Fellowship in the Humanities at Bryn Mawr's Center for Ethnicities, and the generous hospitality of Eleanor Gesensway and Richard Horowitz. For crucial, last-minute assistance, special thanks to Mark Frazier Lloyd at the University of Pennsylvania Archives and Deborah Ege at Archives and Special Collections, Dickinson College. ^1.� Marion D. Learned, "The Pennsylvania German and His English and Scotch Irish Neighbors," Papers and Addresses of the Lebanon County Historical Society 2, no. 11 (December 1903): 318–19. ^2.� David A. Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York, 1995), 101. ^3.� Horace M. Kallen, "Democracy Versus the Melting-Pot: A Study of American Nationality," Nation 100 (February 18 and 25, 1915), 190–94, 217–20; Randolph Bourne, "Trans-National America," Atlantic Monthly 118 (July 1916): 86–97, reprinted in War and the Intellectuals: Essays by Randolph S. Bourne, 1915–1919, ed. Carl Resek (New York, 1964), 107–23; John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925, 2nd rev. ed. (New York, 1981), 304; Hollinger, Postethnic America, 101. For this common depiction of cultural pluralism's career, see, for example, ibid., 86–98; Philip Gleason, "The Odd Couple: Pluralism and Assimilation," in Gleason, Speaking of Diversity: Language and Ethnicity in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore, 1992), 47–90; Philip Gleason, "American Identity and Americanization," in Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, ed. Stephan Thernstrom (Cambridge, MA, 1980), 43–46; John Higham, "Ethnic Pluralism in Modern American Thought," in Higham, Send These to Me: Immigrants in Urban America, rev. ed. (Baltimore, 1984), 198–232; James Henry Powell, "The Concept of Cultural Pluralism in American Social Thought, 1915–1965" (PhD diss., University of Notre Dame, 1971). ^4.� Higham, "Ethnic Pluralism," 215, 210; Hollinger, Postethnic America, 100–1. ^5.� In addition to the work of Gleason, Higham, and Powell mentioned above, see, for example, Bruce Clayton, Forgotten Prophet: The Life of Randolph Bourne (Baton Rouge, LA, 1984); Casey Nelson Blake, Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford (Chapel Hill, NC, 1990); Everett Helmut Akam, Transnational America: Cultural Pluralist Thought in the Twentieth Century (Lanham, MD, 2002). ^6.� W. E. B. Du Bois, "The Conservation of Races," American Negro Academy Occasional Papers, no. 2 (1897), reprinted in W. E. B. Du Bois Speaks: Speeches and Addresses, 1890–1919, ed. Philip S. Foner (New York, 1970), 73–85; David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 (New York, 1993), 172; Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (New York, 2001), 395. Some social work literature casts Hull House founder Jane Addams as an early pluralist, an assessment Rivka Shpak Lissak disputed. George C. White, "Social Settlements and Immigrant Neighbors, 1886–1914," Social Service Review 33 (1959): 55–66; Mark M. Krug, The Melting of the Ethnics: Education of the Immigrants, 1880–1914 (Bloomington, IN, 1976), 72, 74; Lissak, Pluralism and Progressives: Hull House and the New Immigrants, 1890–1919 (Chicago, 1989), 8, 182–84, and passim; White and Krug, cited in ibid., 8n. Two recent works have delved into the early roots and social context of Kallen's pluralism: Sarah Schmidt, Horace M. Kallen: Prophet of American Zionism (Brooklyn, NY, 1995), and Daniel Greene, "The Crisis of Jewish Freedom: The Menorah Association and American Pluralism, 1906–1934" (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2004). ^7.� Bluford Adams, "New Ireland: The Place of Immigrants in American Regionalism," Journal of American Ethnic History 24 (Winter 2005): 3–33; Kathleen Neils Conzen, "German-Americans and the Invention of Ethnicity," in America and the Germans: An Assessment of a Three-Hundred-Year History, vol. 1, Immigration, Language, Ethnicity, ed. Frank Trommler and Joseph McVeigh (Philadelphia, 1985), 134, 136–37, 139–41. Conzen notes that such German American formulations "laid the groundwork for Progressive-era conceptualizations of pluralism"; see Kathleen Neils Conzen, "Phantom Landscapes of Colonization: Germans in the Making of a Pluralist America," in The German-American Encounter: Conflict and Cooperation between Two Cultures, 1800–2000, ed. Frank Trommler and Elliott Shore (New York, 2001), 17–18. ^8.� John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ, 1992), 97–107. ^9.� I have Kathleen Conzen to thank for the phrase "vernacular pluralism," which I first heard from her. My conceptualization draws in part on John Bodnar's account of the role ordinary people's "vernacular culture" plays in creating public memory, including its regional, state, and ethnic versions. However, while Bodnar posits a divide between vernacular culture and an "official" culture that promotes nationalism, I see "vernacular" pluralisms more as a counterpart to "high" academic pluralism. Vernacular pluralist notions could be the work of ordinary people, but also of intellectuals operating from a particular local, regional, or ethnic perspective. See Bodnar, Remaking America, 13–20. ^10.� For a few among many examples of such works, see Michael Zuckerman, ed., Friends and Neighbors: Group Life in America's First Plural Society (Philadelphia, 1982); Sally Schwartz, "A Mixed Multitude": The Struggle for Toleration in Colonial Pennsylvania (New York and London, 1988); Ned C. Landsman, "Roots, Routes, and Rootedness: Diversity, Migration, and Toleration in Mid-Atlantic Pluralism," Early American Studies 2 (Fall 2004): 267–309; Gary B. Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia's Black Community, 1720–1840 (Cambridge, MA, 1988); William A. Pencak and Daniel K. Richter, eds., Friends and Enemies in Penn's Woods: Indians, Colonists, and the Racial Construction of Pennsylvania (University Park, PA, 2004). ^11.� Russell A. Kazal, Becoming Old Stock: The Paradox of German-American Identity (Princeton, NJ, 2004), 20–22; Steven M. Nolt, Foreigners in Their Own Land: Pennsylvania Germans in the Early Republic (University Park, PA, 2002). ^12.� "Discovering America" opened in 1992 for a five-year run; exhibit invitation from The Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies, in author's possession. ^13.� David E. Washburn, ed., The Peoples of Pennsylvania: An Annotated Bibliography of Resource Materials (Pittsburgh, PA, 1981), xi; Allen F. Davis and Mark H. Haller, eds., The Peoples of Philadelphia: A History of Ethnic Groups and Lower-Class Life, 1790–1940 (Philadelphia, 1973); R. O. Hughes, Pennsylvania Past and Present (Boston, 1944), 21–28, 180–83; S. K. Stevens, Pennsylvania History in Outline (Harrisburg, PA, 1942), 3 ("The Peopling of Pennsylvania"), 14, 27; group photograph of the cast of "The Peoples of Pennsylvania" pageant, June 1933, Altoona Senior High School Pageant photographs (PG 232), Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (hereafter HSP). ^14.� Sydney George Fisher, The Making of Pennsylvania: An Analysis of the Elements of the Population and the Formative Influences That Created One of the Greatest of the American States (Philadelphia, 1896), iii. ^15.� See, for example, Martin G. Brumbaugh, preface to Two Centuries of Pennsylvania History, by Isaac Sharpless (Philadelphia, 1900), v; Joseph S. Walton and Martin G. Brumbaugh, Stories of Pennsylvania, or, School Readings from Pennsylvania History (New York, 1897), 5–6; Samuel Whitaker Pennypacker, Pennsylvania: The Keystone, A Short History (Philadelphia, 1914), 18, 49–50, 58–59, and passim. ^16.� Brumbaugh, preface to Two Centuries, v (quotation); Fisher, Making of Pennsylvania, 32; Pennypacker, Pennsylvania, chaps. 4–6; William Mason Cornell, The History of Pennsylvania, from the Earliest Discovery to the Present Time (Philadelphia, 1876), chaps. 2–6; Thomas Kilby Smith, The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (New York, 1917), chap. 2. ^17.� J. H. Battle, ed., History of Bucks County, Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1887), 479; Higham, Strangers in the Land, 22–23. For the "asylum" language, see also Theodore W. Bean, ed., History of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1884), 143; George Chambers, A Tribute to the Principles, Virtues, Habits and Public Usefulness of the Irish and Scotch Early Settlers of Pennsylvania, 2nd ed. (Chambersburg, PA, 1871), 5. ^18.� Bean, ed., History of Montgomery County, 367. For less strident depictions of the colony as a Protestant enterprise, see Fisher, Making of Pennsylvania, 34–40, and, implicitly, Walton and Brumbaugh, Stories of Pennsylvania, 5–6. ^19.� Pennypacker, Pennsylvania, 18; Battle, ed., History of Bucks County, 9, 292; Bean, ed., History of Montgomery County, 147–48, 102, 142; J. H. Battle, ed., History of Columbia and Montour Counties, Pennsylvania (Chicago, 1887), part 2, 38, 58; J. Thomas Scharf and Thompson Westcott, History of Philadelphia, 1609–1884, 3 vols. (Philadelphia, 1884), 2: 853, 1: 79. ^20.� Sally F. Griffith, Serving History in a Changing World: The Historical Society of Pennsylvania in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia, 2001), 19; Gary B. Nash, First City: Philadelphia and the Forging of Historical Memory (Philadelphia, 2002), 291. Fisher gave addresses to the HSP, while Pennypacker served as its president from 1900 to 1916; Hampton L. Carson, A History of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, vol. 2 (Philadelphia, 1940), 231, 234, 428. On Pennypacker's colonial ancestry, see ibid., 150; on Fisher's, see his entry in Dictionary of American Biography, vol. 6 (New York, 1937), 411 (title hereafter DAB). On the HSP in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Carson, History, vols. 1–2, and Griffith, Serving History, chap. 1. ^21.� J. Smith Futhey, Historical Discourse Delivered on the Occasion of the One Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary of the Upper Octorara Presbyterian Church, Chester County, Pennsylvania, September 14, 1870 ... with an Account of the Celebration and an Appendix (Philadelphia, 1870), 26; Morton L. Montgomery, History of Berks County in Pennsylvania, (Philadelphia, 1886) v. See also the Tables of Contents of Bean, ed., History of Montgomery County; Battle, ed., History of Bucks County; Pennypacker, Pennsylvania; and Fisher, Making of Pennsylvania. ^22.� "Historical Pageant, Friday, October 9, 1908," card located in Folder: "Oberholtzer, Ellis Paxson," Box 3, Marion Dexter Learned Collection, Archives and Special Collections, Boyd Lee Spahr Library, Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania (collection referred to hereafter as Learned Collection). ^23.� Scharf and Westcott, History of Philadelphia, vol. 1, 113, cited in Judith Amanda Hunter, "Before Pluralism: The Political Culture of Nativism in Antebellum Philadelphia" (PhD diss., Yale University, 1991), 68. ^24.� Recognizing past diversity did not automatically translate into a pluralist stance toward present-day Pennsylvania. One could argue, as Isaac Sharpless did in 1900, that the province's "original races" became "fused" over the nineteenth century. Conversely, one could recognize the persistence down to the present of colonial-era ethnic groups and still damn the result, as Fisher did when he berated Pennsylvania Germans for hanging on to "Germanisms." See Sharpless, Two Centuries, 370, 367; Fisher, Making of Pennsylvania, 130; and especially James M. Swank, "The Lack of Civic Pride in Pennsylvania," Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 29, no. 1 (1905): 49–50 (journal title hereafter PMHB). ^25.� Scharf and Westcott, History of Philadelphia, 113; Chambers, Tribute, 3, 5–8, 36 (Chambers's preface to this work is dated 1856); Futhey, Historical Discourse, 26; J. Smith Futhey and Gilbert Cope, History of Chester County, Pennsylvania, with Genealogical and Biographical Sketches (Philadelphia, 1881), 245–46; J. Smith Futhey, An Autobiography (West Chester, PA, 1889), 67; Albert Cook Myers, "Gilbert Cope," Publications of the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania 10 (March 1929): 246. ^26.� Joshua L. Chamberlain, Edward Potts Cheyney, and Ellis Paxson Oberholtzer, eds., Universities and Their Sons: University of Pennsylvania: Its History, Influence, Equipment and Characteristics (Boston, 1902), 224, 356; "Men and Things," Philadelphia Bulletin, undated newsclipping, in Folder: "Rev. Robert Ellis Thompson," Alumni Records Collection, University of Pennsylvania Archives, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. ^27.� Robert E. Thompson, "Ulster in America," Penn Monthly 1 (June 1870): 201–9; Robert Ellis Thompson, "The German Mystics as American Colonists," three-part series in Penn Monthly 2 (August–October 1871): 391–403, 443–51, 487–97; Carson, History, 2: 153, 97, 147. ^28.� John Dyer, "The Race or the Hybrid," Penn Monthly 3 (October 1872): 568, 564, 569–70. ^29.� R. E. Thompson, "The Norse Element in Later English History," Penn Monthly 1 (July 1870): 250. Handwritten notes on a table of contents for volume 2 of Penn Monthly, held at Penn's Van Pelt Library, identify the authors of a number of articles; next to two of Dyer's articles are written, "R.E.T."; "Contents of Volume II," Penn Monthly 2 (January–December 1871), iii–vii. Philadelphia city directories for 1870 and 1875 list a handful of John Dyers, all but one of whom were identified as skilled workers or small business owners. A Penn alumni directory also records a John Dyer Jr. in this period, an 1835 graduate of the school's Medical Department who died in Philadelphia in 1892. See Gopsill's Philadelphia City Directory for 1870 (Philadelphia, 1870), 497; Gopsill's Philadelphia City Directory for 1875 (Philadelphia, 1875), 463, 462; W. J. Maxwell, comp., General Alumni Catalogue of the University of Pennsylvania, 1917 ([Philadelphia], 1917), 608, 1209. ^30.� Scharf and Westcott, History of Philadelphia, 113; Frank Ried Diffenderffer, The Palatine and Quaker as Commonwealth Builders: Address Delivered Before the Pennsylvania Historical Society at Philadelphia, March 14, 1898 (Lancaster, PA, 1899), 3–13, 24, 29; Pennypacker, Pennsylvania, 18, 177. Both Diffenderffer and Pennypacker served as president of the Pennsylvania German Society; Publications of the Pennsylvania History Club (Philadelphia, 1909), 26, 50. ^31.� H. L. Fisher, "The Pennsylvania Germans," in History of York County, Pennsylvania, ed. John Gibson (Chicago, 1886), 267, 245. See also A. R. Horne, "The Pennsylvania Germans," in History of the Counties of Lehigh & Carbon in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, ed. Alfred Mathews and Austin N. Hungerford (Philadelphia, 1884), 23, 37, 39, 42. ^32.� Kathleen Neils Conzen, David A. Gerber, Ewa Morawska, George E. Pozzetta, and Rudolph J. Vecoli, "The Invention of Ethnicity: A Perspective from the U.S.A.," Journal of American Ethnic History 12 (September 1992): 3–41; Conzen, "German-Americans and the Invention of Ethnicity," 139, 141, 136–37; Higham, Strangers in the Land, 20–23; Gleason, "American Identity and Americanization," 31–43; Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (London, 1962 [1782]), 43. On Anglo-American understandings of the "melting pot"—the term entered popular usage in American English only with Israel Zangwill's 1908 play of the same name—see also Richard Conant Harper, The Course of the Melting Pot Idea to 1910 (New York, 1980; reprint of Harper, "The Course of the Melting Pot Idea to 1910" [EdD diss., Columbia University, 1967]). ^33.� C. F. Huch, "Der Deutsche Pionier-Verein von Philadelphia," Mitteilungen des Deutschen Pionier-Vereins von Philadelphia 10 (1909): 18–21; G. Kellner, "Deutsch-Amerikanische Geschichts-Forschung und Dr. Oswald Seidensticker," in 130th Anniversary of the German Society Contributing for the Relief of Distressed Germans in the State of Pennsylvania, December 26, 1894 ([Philadelphia, 1894]), 76, 88; Carson, History, 2: 139, 435, 153; "Proceedings of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania," PMHB 3, no. 1 (1879): 108; O. Seidensticker, "The First Anti-Slavery Protest," Penn Monthly 5 (July 1874): 496–503. ^34.� Oswald Seidensticker, Die Erste Deutsche Einwanderung in Amerika und die Gründung von Germantown, im Jahre 1683: Festschrift zum deutsch-amerikanischen Pionier-Jubliäum am 6. October 1883 (Philadelphia, 1883), 8–10, 27 (quotations are my translation). ^35.� Oswald Seidensticker, "William Penn's Travels in Holland and Germany in 1677," PMHB 2, no. 3 (1878): 237; Kazal, Becoming Old Stock, 130–32; Clifton James Child, The German-Americans in Politics, 1914–1917 (Madison, WI, 1939); Max Heinrici, ed., Das Buch der Deutschen in Amerika (Philadelphia, 1909), 4; H. M. Ferren, "Monolingualism the Bane of This Country," German American Annals, n.s., 1 (August 1903): 443–44; Adolph Timm, "Der Nationalbund und die Deutsch Amerikaner," German American Annals, n.s., 1, (January 1903): 54–55; "The German American Historical Society," Americana Germanica 4, no. 2 (1902): 209; "Address of Dr. C. J. Hexamer: Laying of the Corner Stone of the German Theater, July 4, 1905," German American Annals, n.s., 3 (July 1905): 295; Higham, "Ethnic Pluralism," 200, 205. ^36.� John J. Appel, "Marion Dexter Learned and the German American Historical Society," PMHB 86 (July 1962): 294, 297–98; "Marion Dexter Learned," The Pennsylvania-German 12 (June 1911): 354; "Learned, Marion Dexter," DAB, vol. 11 (New York, 1933), 78; Autobiographical statement, 1900, and Hamersly proof, both in Folder: "Learned, Marion Dexter: Biographical statements, &c.," Box 1, Learned Collection; Marion Dexter Learned, The Pennsylvania German Dialect (Baltimore, 1889), preface (unpaginated); E. R. Schmidt, "Die Deutsche Gesellschaft von Pennsylvanien und der Pionier-Verein," in 130th Anniversary of the German Society, 24; "Address of Provost Charles C. Harrison," Opening of the Bechstein Germanic Library, Addresses, University of Pennsylvania, March 21, 1896 (Philadelphia, 1896), 5; Daniel B. Shumway, "Professor Learned as Colleague," German American Annals, n.s., 15 (September–December 1917): 151. John Appel provides the most thorough recent account of Learned; see Appel, "Marion Dexter Learned," and John J. Appel, Immigrant Historical Societies in the United States, 1880–1950 (New York, 1980), chap. 4. ^37.� Learned, Pennsylvania German Dialect, 1; "Learned, Marion Dexter," DAB, vol. 11, 78; Autobiographical statement, in Folder: "Learned, Marion Dexter: Autobiographical statement," Box 1, Learned Collection; Appel, "Marion Dexter Learned," 298n, 297–301, 309; Pennsylvania History Club, 4–5, 42–44; Protokoll der Konstituirenden Konvention des Deutsch-Amerikanischen National-Bundes der Ver. Staaten von Amerika. Abgehalten am Sonntag, den 6. October 1901, in der Halle der Deutschen Gesellschaft von Pennsylvanien, zu Philadelphia, Pa. (n.p. [1901]) ; "The German American Historical Society," 208–209. ^38.� Learned, Pennsylvania German Dialect, 114, 1–2. ^39.� "Address of Professor M. D. Learned," Opening of the Bechstein Germanic Library, 33; M. D. Learned, German as a Culture Element in American Education (Milwaukee, WI, 1898), 10, 23–24 (emphasis in the original; partially quoted in Appel, "Marion Dexter Learned," 305). On ethnic decline, see Kazal, Becoming Old Stock, 79–84, 132–34. ^40.� Learned, "The Pennsylvania German," 318–22, 324–27. ^41.�Pennsylvania History Club, 43; Appel, "Marion Dexter Learned," 302; Paul Michael Lützeler et al., "The St. Louis World's Fair of 1904 as a Site of Cultural Transfer: German and German-American Participation," in German Culture in Nineteenth-Century America: Reception, Adaptation, Transformation, ed. Lynne Tatlock and Matt Erlin (Rochester, NY, 2005), 77; St. Louis Globe-Democrat, September 17, 1904, p. 2. A German translation of Learned's speech was published under this title in German American Annals: M. D. Learned, "Harmonie der Rassen in Amerika und der Völkerfriede," German American Annals,

The Lost World of Pennsylvania Pluralism: Immigrants, Regions, and the Early Origins of Pluralist Ideologies in America

RUSSELL A. KAZAL

PEOPLES OF PENNSYLVANIA

IMMIGRANTS AND A "STILL-DEVELOPING PEOPLE"

MARION DEXTER LEARNED AND THE "HARMONY OF RACES"

LEARNED'S PLURALISM: ROOTS, REACH, AND LIMITS

NOTES