First paragraph:
From the early 1880s until the outbreak of the Great War, twenty million immigrants arrived in the United States. Most of them came from southern and eastern Europe rather than the northern and western European sources to which Americans were accustomed, and Jews made up a sizable portion of these new immigrants. While some Americans continued to conceive the country as a melting pot, an image popularized by the British-born Jewish playwright Israel Zangwill, other Americans called for the exclusion or coercive Americanization of the new immigrants. Against these voices, a small minority of dissenting intellectuals argued that American identity should rest on an ideal of harmonious diversity, not racial or cultural homogeneity. The American Jewish philosopher Horace Meyer Kallen (1882–1974) was the chief spokesman for this view, which he outlined in his 1915 essay “Democracy versus the Melting-Pot” and later called cultural pluralism.