Throughout most of her career, Charlotte Perkins Gilman advocated a race-based nationalism she most clearly expressed in her 1922 poem “The Melting Pot.” The poem uses the analogy between different races and different cooking ingredients to suggest that inter-racial mixing—“when all of the ingredients here should comingle”—will inevitably threaten the nation's social well-being. For what is produced in a melting pot in which the most diverse elements are carelessly combined is surely not a delicious “soup” or a “good cake” but “swill” or kitchen garbage fed to pigs. “The Melting Pot” insists both on the imperative to protect the integrity of distinct races and on the inferiority of multi-racial social communities.1
Published in the same year as James Weldon Johnson's seminal anthology The Book of American Negro Poetry and only three years prior to Alain Locke's The New Negro, Gilman's poem affirms an expressivist culture model that, in...
