Nathan Glazer - Early Postwar Career

Early Postwar Career

World War II led to a belief among some of the CCNY leftists, including Glazer, that fascism was a greater threat than capitalism, and that the United States, as a country that fought the fascists, ought to be viewed more favorably. Glazer became a member of the anti-communist left, and only mildly criticized Joseph McCarthy when writing of him in the magazine Commentary.

Looking back at the McCarthy era over 40 years later as an interviewee in the film Arguing the World, Glazer reflected on the stance he and some other liberal anti-communists took: "Even at the time and also in retrospect we never managed to figure out a good position, one that was respectable and moral and responsive to all the complicated issues raised...I still don't think we have one." In general much of Glazer's work in the 1950s had strong strains of patriotism and optimism about the future, including a belief that the overwhelming majority of immigrants would come to identify completely with American values and thus assimilate into American society.

In 1960 Glazer began writing articles about ethnic groups in New York City, and these would eventually be collected and published in 1963 as the book Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians and Irish of New York City, arguably Glazer's most well-known work. While Daniel Patrick Moynihan was listed as co-author, and the book itself would often be referred to as "Moynihan and Glazer", Moynihan wrote only the chapter on the Irish and much of the conclusion, with the rest being the work of Glazer.

In essence, as one retrospective noted 25 years later, Glazer and Moynihan suggested that "the melting pot metaphor didn't hold water." The book argued that the children and grandchildren of earlier immigrants to New York City, including Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish, had retained their ethnic consciousness and that the phenomenon of persistent ethnic identities over the course of generations would continue to endure. This conclusion was fairly novel for the early 1960s, a time when there was relatively little interest in studying ethnic groups.

Glazer and Moynihan also argued that the "disproportionate presence of Negroes and Puerto Ricans on welfare" was one of the primary racial problems in the city, though they suggested the 1970s could end up being a "decade of optimism" for those two groups. Years later when marking the 25th anniversary of the book, Glazer would admit that the 1970s (and indeed later years) had not brought significant change for these groups, and that many African Americans and Puerto Ricans remained members of the "great dependent class." James Traub has argued that Beyond the Melting Pot was "one of the most popular, and most influential, works of sociology of its time."