326 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1946 
that California was jammed to the last shack and trailer, 383,252 people had 
arrived by automobile alone in the first 2 months of the year. And they were 
no longer just the aged from Iowa, going west to die. Many were young and 
vigorous, their future bright before them. A wartime poll of service men Ssta- 
tioned in California showed that 52 percent wanted to stay there. 
Obviously this internal migration has served to break up and mix up 
many heretofore stabilized communities. One result of this is that 
both the latest foreign-born and the inbred descendents of the older 
foreign-born are marrying more and more out of their national groups. 
As long ago as 1931 in “An Ethnic Survey of Woonsocket, Rhode 
Island,” Wessel found that, whereas in the first generation born in 
this country intermarriage amounted to only 12.1 percent, by the third 
(and 3/2) generation, it had reached 40.4 percent. She found also that 
“the Irish and British rank first in marrying out of their group. By 
comparison with these, French Canadians are slow to intermarry. 
Jews seldom intermarry.” [P.109.] 
In this connection it is appropriate to return to the dramatist Israel 
Zangwill and to quote a pertinent statement which appears in the 
appendix to the 1914 edition of his play, “The Melting-pot” : 
[Religious] discords, together with the prevalent anti-Semitism and his own 
ingrained persistence, tend to preserve the Jew even in the “Melting-pot,” so 
that his dissolution must be necessarily slower than that of the similar aggrega- 
tions of Germans, Italians or Poles. But the process for all is the same, however 
tempered by specific factors. Beginning as broken-off bits of Germany, Italy or 
Poland, with newspapers and theaters in German, Italian or Polish, these colonies 
gradually become Americanized, their vernaculars, even when jealously cherished, 
become a mere medium for American conceptions of life; while in the third 
generation the child is ashamed both of its parents and their lingo, the newspapers 
dwindle in circulation, the theaters languish. The reality of this progress has 
been denied by no less distinguished an American than Dr. Charles Eliot, ex- 
president of Harvard University, whose prophecy of Jewish solidarity in America 
and of the contribution of Judaism to the world’s future is more optimistic than 
my own. Dr. Eliot points to the still unmelted heaps of racial matter, without 
suspecting—although he is a chemist—that their semblance of solidity is only 
kept up by the constant immigration of similar atoms to the base to replace those 
liquefied at the apex. Once America slams her doors, the crucible will roar like 
a closed furnace. [Pp. 209-210.] 
As we have seen, the door was slammed about 20 years ago. And 
available evidence seems to bear out this prediction: the process of 
racial amalgamation in America is speeding up; the crucible is roaring 
like a closed furnace. 
STUDYING THE PRODUCT OF THD MIXTURE 
For many years now physical anthropologists have been trying to 
discover the American physical type that is emerging as the product 
of the melting pot. To evaluate properly the studies made thus far it 
