immigration, one of the most important intellectual events of the progressive era, raised many of the same issues raised by debates about the democratization of culture. The same kinds of arguments were advanced in both contexts; the same alignment of opinion emerged; and the "puritans" lined up on the wrong side of the issue, associating themselves either with a narrow view of democracy or with outright opposition to democracy.

In the immigration debate, three distinct positions came to the surface: exclusionist, assimilationist, and pluralist. These positions coincided quite closely with positions taken by those who debated the democratization of culture. The same people who believed that "culture" presupposed wealth and leisure tended, on the whole, to oppose unrestricted immigration, just as they opposed attempts to guarantee universal access to the "best that had been thought and done in the world." The democratization of culture would only bring about its dilution, they argued, in the same way that unrestricted immigration would dilute the Anglo-Saxon stock and make the United States a nation of mongrels.

Democrats naturally found such opinions repugnant, but they did not agree among themselves about the best alternative. Those who wanted, in effect, to democratize the consumption of high culture advocated a similar approach to the immigration problem: unrestricted immigration, coupled with an aggressive program of cultural assimilation. Israel Zangwill's play The Melting Pot, first performed in 1908, provided a classic statement of the assimilationist position. Zangwill condemned both anti‐ Semitism and Jewish nationalism. The action of his play turned on intermarriage, which he treated as the best way to bury old-world animosities. In America, he wrote, "we must look forward" by "forgetting all that nightmare of religions and races." Assimilation implied oblivion. The "heritage from the Old World, hate and vengeance and blood," held back racial reconciliation and progress. "The ideals of the fathers shall not be foisted on the children. Each generation must live and die for its own dreams." The symbolism of the melting pot—"this great new continent that could melt up all racial differences and vendettas"—made quite explicit what had always been implicit in the ideology of progress: the dependence of progress on amnesia.

The anthropologist Franz Boas, a consistent champion of racial tolerance, made the same kind of case for assimilation, calling in social science

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