to provide it with secure foundations. The myth of white racial superiority, Boas pointed out, had no scientific standing. Particularism was atavistic and irrational in any form. Tribalism, ethnocentrism, nationalism, and class consciousness all rested on a primitive fear of the stranger. The "enlargement of political units" in the modern world was an eminently desirable development, since it broke down the "emotional feeling of the solidarity of the group" and led people "to recognize equal rights for all individuals." The mass migrations of modern times, culminating in the latest wave of immigration to the United States, had the same effect. The "masses in our modern city populations," having known nothing of the "conservative influence of a home in which parents and children lived a common life," had escaped the "unconscious control of traditional ideas." Modern social conditions encouraged racial and ethnic intermarriage and a growing acceptance of the idea that people had a "right to be treated as individuals, not as members of a class." Boas did not deny the tenacity of racial prejudice, but he counted on "intermixture" to weaken the "consciousness of race distinction." When the "Negro blood" had been so much diluted" that it could "no longer be recognized as such," the "Negro problem" would "disappear," just as anti-Semitism would dissolve when "the last vestige of the Jew as a Jew" had "disappeared."

Cultural pluralists agreed with Zangwill and Boas in condemning racial and ethnic intolerance, but they objected to a definition of democracy that laid so much stress on uniformity and the eradication of group memory. Bourne's 1915 essay, "Trans-National America," though directed against a cruder version of the assimilationist ideal, implicitly questioned more refined versions as well. Unlike Boas, Bourne did not see the disintegration of "nationalistic cultures" as a positive development. In his view, it produced "hordes of men and women without a spiritual country, cultural outlaws, without taste, without standards but those of the mob." The melting pot brewed a "tasteless, colorless fluid of uniformity." Boas thought that men and women uprooted from tribal loyalties had a chance to become individuals. Bourne thought they became the "flotsam and jetsam of American life, the downward undertow of our civilization with its leering cheapness and falseness of taste and spiritual outlook."

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