ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE MELTING POT? 
By T. D. STEWART 
Curator, Division of Physical Anthropology, U. S. National Museum 
... America is God’s Crucible, the great Melting-pot, where all races of 
Europe are melting and re-forming! * * * Here you stand in your 50 groups, 
with your 50 languages and histories, and your 50 blood hatreds and rivalries. 
But you won’t be long like that, brothers, for these are the fires of God. ... A fig 
for your feuds and yendettas! Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and English- 
men, Jews and Russians—into the Crucible with you all! God is making the 
American. 
* * * the real American has not yet arrived. He is only in the Crucible. 
* ¥* * he will be the fusion of all races, perhaps the coming superman.—F rom 
The Melting-pot: A Drama in Four Acts, by Israel Zangwill. 
INTRODUCTION 
One of the outstanding phenomena in the field of human biology 
during the nineteenth century was the rapid population growth of 
the United States. By 1900 the population of continental United 
States had increased more than fourteenfold.2, In Europe, by con- 
trast, France had failed to double its population and Belgium alone 
had attained a threefold increase. Stating this comparison in another 
way, at the beginning of the nineteenth century every important 
European country, even including Spain and Turkey, exceeded the 
United States in number of inhabitants; whereas now only the 
U.S. S. R. has a larger population. 
To a considerable extent this remarkable rate of population growth 
was due to an attendant phenomenon of human biology, remarkable 
itself for scale, namely, immigration. Between 1830 when it got 
well under way, and soon after 1920 when it practically ceased, over 
88 million immigrants arrived in the United States. This accretion 
from foreign sources is about equal to the total population of our 
country in 1870 or to that of France in 1895. It is easy to see, there- 
fore, why at the height of this period of immigration (1908) Israel 
Zangwill, the dramatist, was led to coin the metaphor “melting pot” 
1 Address of the retiring president of the Anthropological Society of Washington, de- 
livered before the Society on the evening of Apr. 16, 1946. 
2Such introductory statements are based on the census publications listed in the 
bibliography at the end. 
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