This article ran in the Tallahassee Democrat on October 18, 1992.

Recently a person whose opinion I respect suggested that the pluralist ideal belongs exclusively to the current advocates of multiculturalism and not to the older 1950s proponents of integration. I was quite surprised. His statement was motivated by the very best intentions: to further our commitment to multiculturalism--which is one of the most beneficial impulses of the past twenty years.

But good intentions do not necessarily produce good history. Nor do they automatically produce good cultural politics. Since the ideas of pluralism and multiculturalism are so central to our current self-conception, it is a proper time to ask ourselves important questions about them. First, what do pluralism, integration, and multiculturalism mean, and how are these concepts related to each other? Second, what are the political implications of assuming that multiculturalism is the sole guardian of pluralism?

Pluralism, as the word is generally used today, simply means accepting ethnic and other kinds of diversity in society. As such, pluralism is a decentralist ideal. That is, it works to scatter the cultural power of society instead of bringing it together into one big unit. And as a decentralist outlook, pluralism has a long history in America. After all, Jeffersonian individualism is at the heart of the decentralist impulse in America, so we might say that pluralism has some roots that go back at least as far as the 18th century. But pluralist values encourage decentralized groups, not individuals, so Jeffersonianism was not really what we think of as pluralism--although it was related.

When the young French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States in the 1830s, he noted that Americans, more than other cultures, liked to belong to volunteer groups. So by the early 19th century, Tocqueville (who is credited with coining the term "individualism") observed not a society of Jeffersonian individualists but one where individuals often expressed their values through involvement in associations. Although the formal concept of pluralism didn't yet exist, the society of many (or plural) groups that Tocqueville described was the forerunner of our current pluralist idea.

In the first half of the 20th century, conceptions about pluralism developed more shape. Both Teddy Roosevelt's New Nationalism in the first decade of the century, and Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal twenty years later, promoted what has been called a "broker state." The idea was that government, now willing to play a greater role in society and the economy, would listen to requests from different groups in the population and deal out an equitable share to each--like a broker. Again, this had overtones of pluralism since it focused on group identities in society. Another large step toward a framework of pluralism resulted from the work of John Dewey in the 1930s, who suggested that Americans operated within a system of interrelated groups--which he called "associationism."

But it wasn't really until the 1940s and 1950s that the concept of "liberal pluralism" was formally named, articulated, and developed as a theory. The idea of pluralism, as it rose into public view, was constructed by mid-century sociologists such as Edward Shils, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Daniel Bell after World War II.

Pluralism, in its developed form, proposed that each individual belonged to many groups. One person, for example, might belong to a Southern Baptist Association, a Hispanic culture club, and a fishing organization. Another person might belong to the National Rifle Association, an environmental group, and the Veterans of Foreign Wars. A third person might belong to an African-American group, the Republican party, and a local gardening organization.

By belonging to many groups, the pluralist theory suggested, we all had multiple and overlapping conceptions of ourselves. We weren't one-dimensional. We didn't associate with only one kind of people, but identified with other people in many complex and sometimes contradictory ways that pulled us in several directions at the same time. It kept us from being separatists who were willing to see only one side of our identity. It prevented us from being fanatical proponents of any one political or social solution.

Our ties to several (plural) groups--that cut across race, class, ethnicity, gender, and interest--would mean that how we felt about an issue concerning the environment, for example, might have to be moderated by how it influenced our attachments to other groups with contradictory beliefs. This pluralist vision of overlapping attachments promoted the virtue of allowing us to keep and nurture our own ethnic (and other) group identities, while at the same time it encouraged us to value what we shared together as a culture through our different group commitments.

Further, pluralism at midcentury accompanied a color-blind ideal of equality and opportunity in America. It believed in integration rather than assimilation. Assimilation hoped to produce people who were all the same--as though they were fused together in a melting pot. But integration, utilizing the values of liberal pluralism, encouraged a society that recognized and respected differences but hoped to mesh these different identities into a network of overlapping and shared culture. This liberal-pluralist-integrationist outlook hoped that differences and commonalities would be poised in balance, but not eliminated.

Significantly, this was not a white idea being thrust on the rest of America. It was also the vision of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., who hoped it would produce a beloved and harmonious community, and it was the ideal of the early Civil Rights movement generally.

Where did our concept of multiculturalism begin? Some recent literary critics have described the worlds of James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking, Herman Melville's crew of the Pequod, and Mark Twain's raft as early multicultural visions. While those characterizations have met some opposition, certainly few would deny that Walt Whitman's poetry in the 1850s and after was a celebration of American diversity.

In the fields of history and social thought the roots of American multiculturalism are easy to locate. Already by the beginning of the 20th century historians such as Henry Adams, James Harvey Robinson, and Charles Beard were suggesting that history needed to look at the common people instead of only kings, presidents, generals, and other elites.

A similar outlook was brewing among social critics. In 1916 in the Atlantic Monthly Randolph Bourne published his article "Trans-National America," in which he claimed that the country had to "assert a higher ideal than the 'melting pot'" of assimilation. Reflecting on the wave of immigrants that had arrived in the United States in the previous three decades, Bourne believed that a more diverse identity for Americans would be beneficial. "The failure of the melting-pot," he noted optimistically, "far from closing the great American democratic experiment, means that it has only just begun."

But as we currently understand the concept, American multiculturalism didn't arise significantly until the mid-1960s. Prompted by the democratic sympathies of the Civil Rights movement and some parts of the New Left, the new impulse in history, literature, and the social sciences began to study the lives of minorities, women, workers, and the disenfranchised. Historians were encouraged to look at society "from the bottom up," in New Left historian Jesse Lemisch's memorable phrase. Consequently, by the early 1970s there was a growing interest in black history, women's history, labor history, and social history.

Over the past twenty years these related outlooks have moved into a strong (some would say dominant) position in history departments. Currently, many people, hearing an increased mention of multiculturalism, assume that it is a new idea. But like rap music and hip-hop culture, you can be sure that when the fashion hits Tallahassee, Peoria, and McDonald's commercials, it is already orthodoxy and the battle is no longer new.

As the roots of our current multiculturalism developed in the 1960s, the study of various racial, ethnic, and gender identities was accompanied by a justifiable and beneficial celebration of those identities--and the diversity they represented. But the celebration of separate identities led some groups to a separatist position in which those communities thought themselves better off if they could exist in relative isolation from the rest of society.

Some of this separatism was produced by a justifiable frustration with American inequality. For example, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a black activist group, experienced the frustrations of the early Civil Rights movement and the failure of the Mississippi Free Democratic Party to be seated at the 1964 Democratic Convention. So SNCC leaders decided in 1965 that the group would become all black and throw out its white members, many of whom had worked with them from the beginning. Similarly, Malcolm X encouraged blacks to secede from white society in order to preserve their identity.

Since the 1960s, the separatist and nonseparatist wings of the multicultural outlook have co-existed with each other, with the nonseparatists in the strong majority. But in the past few years, the separatists have gained considerable power.

With this brief overview of the history of pluralism and multiculturalism we can begin to see their relationship more clearly. Pluralism is not owned solely by those who call themselves multiculturalists, especially not the separatist wing of that impulse. Quite the contrary. Pluralism is a concept that is at least fifty years old. It was created at a time when liberal reformers still embraced without embarrassment that now maligned concept of integration instead of separatism. Midcentury was a time of hoping for liberal equality, of republican ideals (with a small "r") aimed toward the common good, a time of hoping for a harmonious commonwealth instead of fragmentation. Ironically, the concept of pluralism was designed by those midcentury liberals who believed in integration and who are currently are being denigrated--by those multiculturalists who claim to own pluralism.

Let us all acknowledge that the multicultural ethic in the past twenty years has been one of the best impulses we have witnessed in this century. It has diversified our conception of the American identity in a very beneficial way. We would be impoverished by its absence and would live in a more claustrophobic and dangerous society without it. But let us also acknowledge that if its best value is toleration, its most disturbing trait is separatism. And the separatist side of multiculturalism is becoming increasingly apparent.

In the face of current ethnic and religious hatreds fueling themselves around the world--from the Balkans to the Baltics, from the Middle East to Southeast Asia, from Canada to Africa--even we multicultural Americans may yet find ourselves longing for the midcentury liberal ideals of harmony, integration, commonwealth, and shared culture. We may yet find it useful to blend in some of the midcentury pluralists' emphasis on shared culture with our current admirable celebration of diversity--so that we don't end up with fragmentation, separatism, and cultural balkanization. And this might be done in the name of the democratic liberalism instead of a spiteful conservatism.

Already within the field of history some of those who are most sympathetic to multiculturalism are rethinking the hazards of cultural fragmentation. They are beginning to wonder whether there is an intelligent limit beyond which the celebration of group identities should not be pushed. For most of this century, the threat facing America has been from a centralization out of control: international totalitarianism, fascism, and the dangers to the individual from mass societies. But with the collapse of Soviet and Eastern European Communism a few years ago, the pendulum of danger began to swing back the other way. The greater problem for our generation in the future might be to contain a decentralization that could become destructive. What we hope, of course, is that the pendulum will stabilize in the middle, between the dangers of excessive centralism and decentralism.

Cultural separatism is part of that potentially dangerous decentralizing impulse. Multiculturalism is a good ethic, but, again, the growing evidence of separatism within it is disturbing. We are currently in a period in which we celebrate the separatist ethic of Malcolm X. He was a great man, an articulate and courageous leader, and he deserves our admiration. But it is notable that among the fashion of "X" hats there are no MLK hats to celebrate King's very different legacy.

Naturally, it is the right of some multiculturalists to choose a separatist vision if they wish. But we shouldn't narrow the political alternatives and social debate by suggesting that multiculturalist forces own the belief in pluralism. They don't. As we've seen, pluralism as a concept was invented by midcentury liberals--who promoted its vision of diversity within a framework of shared culture. This was the belief of members of the early Civil Rights movement and Martin Luther King, among others. And this midcentury ethic of overlapping and shared allegiances, which was the original pluralism, still has much to teach us.

With clear thinking, especially about the historical record, we may yet build a multiculturalism whose more disturbing separatist traits are discouraged, but whose beneficial values of toleration, diversity, and community are greatly strengthened.