Melting Pot or Salad Bowl?

When I was growing up, I learned about America as the Great Melting Pot. A place where peoples from the world over came for greater opportunity and a better life. The American Dream was not something unique to Americans, it was something that human beings all over the world yearned for…the chance to succeed, to build wealth, to own a home, to raise a family free from government intervention and tyranny. And America was the place, more than any other, where that Dream was possible. It’s what made America America, and it is this common spirit that has bound our citizens together for two centuries.

Recently, as I worked in corporate America, I stopped hearing reference to America as a “melting pot.” In fact, on one occasion as I reviewed training materials for a major corporation’s Human Resource’s department, I read reference to America as a “Salad Bowl.” No longer, I was instructed, was it appropriate to refer to America as a “melting pot.” The new terminology, with the exact opposite meaning, was “salad bowl,” where each individual maintains his/her identity, interests, culture, and customs. No longer, I was told, can America expect its citizens to have a common spirit that binds them. Instead, we must encourage and thrive on our differences.

In a very real sense, this shift in mentality is reflective of the differences between conservatives and liberals. Conservatives believe that Americans share fundamental beliefs, the inherent rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, the notion that hard work reaps rewards and that anyone of us has equal opportunity to build wealth and live the American Dream, whether that dream be a modest home in the suburbs, a small business, a palatial estate, or hundreds of other unique ideas. The common theme is that anything is possible in America with hard work and perseverance.

Liberals, on the other hand, survive on emphasizing differences…differences in wealth, differences in race, differences in religion, differences in gender. By pitting groups against each other, liberals encourage resentment, and through resentment, garner power. A perfect example of this is the recent campaign’s emphasis on pitting the “haves” against the “have nots,” the notion that being financially successful is to be scorned (i.e., the famous “spreading the wealth” line). There are myriad of other examples, but the point is that unlike conservatives, who believe as Americans we all share a common “American spirit” which allows any one of us the chance for enormous success, liberals must accentuate the differences among individuals and groups of individuals to survive.

Today, as new citizens pledge their allegiance to this great country, and as our nation’s youth grow into adults, we must reclaim what it means to be an American. We as conservatives – in our schools, in our citizenship classes, in our families – must constantly remind ourselves and share with those around us what it means (and has always meant) to be American. We must never lose sight of what America stands for, and we must, as a people, focus on our common American spirit. In short, we must reject the salad bowl mentality. To do otherwise is to run the risk of our differences destroying the very fabric that binds us together as a people and has kept America that “Shining City on a Hill” for more than 200 years.