ABSTRACT
Horace Kallen was patently opposed to assimilation, and proposed what was often described in the early part of the twentieth century as ethnic federalism, and what, in the 1924 reprint of 'Democracy Versus the Melting-Pot' in Culture and Democracy in the United States, Kallen named cultural pluralism. His vision of a state that governed self-consciously organized national groups was based in part on the structures of Switzerland and Great Britain. Though Kallen's ideas about cultural pluralism were not taken up right away in any institutional form, there were at least two significant, thoughtful, non-nativist responses that give some indication as to the manner in which sympathetic ears were considering these new conceptions about assimilation, democracy, and American identity. Kallen found restrictionists/nativists arguments in favor of closing the doors to immigration to be anti-democratic, xenophobic, misguided, and wrongheaded.
