Rethinking the History of Multiculturalism: New Perspectives on American Pluralist Ideologies

Multiculturalism has emerged in the last half-century as a leading if often embattled ideological stance celebrating the ethnic and racial diversity of the United States. One common interpretation traces it to the 1970s, acknowledging a minor precursor in the "cultural pluralism" advanced by intellectuals in the 1910s but casting multiculturalism itself as fundamentally new. Yet this depiction has been challenged by scholars re-examining American pluralist ideologies between World War I and the 1960s, finding that they had wider popularity, stronger institutional roots, and, at times, a role in shaping post-1970 multiculturalism. This new history puts that multiculturalism in a very different light. It is both new and old, a project that has broken with earlier pluralist projects in its broader reach and expanded categories of difference, but one that shares with them an inclusive approach to non-European groups, an institutional base, therapeutic interventions to improve intergroup relations, and a mass audience. This review essay examines the work of two groups of such historians. The first has located vibrant strands of pluralism in American civic culture from the 1920s into the 1960s and the footing they gained in schools, advocacy organizations, and the federal state. The second group has underlined the regional dimension of American pluralism in unearthing pluralist languages and movements in Southern California dating to the 1930s-projects that reflected that region's extraordinary diversity in their focus on multiple groups defined in terms of color.