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ETHNIC STUDIES AS MULTI-DISCIPLINE 215

be no permanent minorities, that everyone was to become an American.
In the same year, Horace Kallen (1882-1974) published a short essay,
which he would later expand into a book, Culture and Democracy (1924),
in which he put forward a countervailing thesis that would be sub-domin-
ant for the next forty years. That was his assertion that a democratic
society would prove its own worth if it preserved and protected the
cultural identification of all its peoples. Kallen's was an attack on
America as a "melting pot" and was seen as such. However, for Kallen,
as for Park, the United States was conceived as a single polity. Kallen
did not believe in national self-determination for each ethnoracial group.
Rather, he was concerned with cultural preservation within a democratic
state society.^
An exception, of course, might be the American Indians with their quasi-
autonomous but socially and economically impoverished reservations, but
perhaps that is a small exception in terms of the numbers involved,
although one that is quite striking symbolically.
The exceptions here are actually two: that of the Indians and that of
the Blacks. In the case of the Indians, in the beginnings of their contact
with Europeans invaders and settlers of the Americas, they regarded
themselves and were regarded by the Europeans as distinct nations.
Hence, their early relations with the people and government of the
United States were bound by diplomatic treaties. This practice continued
for almost a hundred years after the founding of the United States of
America, and some are still in effect. This meant, in effect, that the
Indians, unlike every other people in the United States, were not subject
to the general operations of the federal system, that is, the several states
did not have the same kinds of control over them that they had, say
over Blacks, Asians, or Europeans. This jurisdictional difference was
clearly stated in a Supreme Court case in 1831, Cherokee Nation v.
Georgia, In the opinion delivered in that case by Chief Justice Marshall
a unique status for America's Indians was established, a status under
which they have lived ever since. Marshall declared the Indians to be "a
domestic dependent nation." And so, since 1831, every issue touching the
juridical relations of Indians to Whites has turned on the hermeneutics
entailed in those three fateful words, "domestic dependent nation."

^ Horace Kallen, Culture and Democracy in the United States: Studies in the
Group Psychology of the American People (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1924;
reprint, New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1970).