Nathan Glazer, RIP

Nathan Glazer died on the 19th of last month.

He is best known as the author of BEYOND THE MELTING POT (1963) and of WE ARE ALL MULTICULTURALISTS NOW (1997) These are both books that, as the titles indicate, discussed in a scholarly way the vexed issue of ethnic and cultural identities in the United States within the context of two very different political eras.

There was much else to Glazer's life and career, but I will focus here on those two books, BTMP and WAAMN.

BTMP as a book formally co-authored with Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then executive assistant to the Secretary of Labor. But it is generally recognized as consisting mostly of Glazer's work. It made the then-unusual argument that ethnicities don't melt. Focusing especially on New York City, the authors contended that the children and even grandchildren of waves of immigration to NYC, from Puerto Rico, Italy, Ireland, or by Jews from much of the continent of Europe [Glazer's parents were Jews from Poland, and the family spoke Yiddish at home] -- had retained their identity and consciousness, and that there was no reason to expect that any of them would become indistinguishable from each other or from WASPS. 

AAMN, on the other hand, was a book written when the argument of BTMP had become passe, when it was taken for granted that heritage was and would remain distinctive and indeed there was a strong impulse in many quarters to celebrate that fact. "Multiculturalism" is an "ism" as a celebration, not because or if it is simply an empirical observation.

Glazer wasn't all that happy about this celebration. He wrote, "I feel warmly attached to the old America that was acclaimed in school textbooks" back when the melting pot was the dominant metaphor. He was attached, that is, to the ideal of assimilation and commonality, even though he wrote the book (literally) on the unreality of that ideal. He was worried about the "fixing of lines of division" that had set in by the late '90s because movement in the opposite direction had been idealized.

His life, then, has a fascinating narrative arc. One observer, James Traub, has described that arc as "a terrible dashing of the hopes that liberalism itself once rested upon."

Glazer lived for more than two full decades after WAAMN, but he seems to have taken that warm attachment to the grave with him.