America is God’s Crucible, the great Melting Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and reforming! Here you stand, good folk, think I, when I see them at Ellis Island, here you stand in your fifty groups with your fifty languages and histories . . . into the crucible with you all! God is making the American . . . the real American has not yet arrived. He is only in the crucible, I tell you—he will be the fusion of all the races.
—Excerpted from The Melting Pot, 1909, by Israel Zangwill
Americans are a mixture of every race unified
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