Jeanne Marie Laskas Quotes
Importing foreign labor has always been the American way, beginning with 4 million slaves from Africa. Later came the Jews and Poles, the Hungarians, Italians and Irish, the Chinese and Japanese - everything you learned in sixth grade social studies about the great American melting pot.
Laskas, Jeanne Marie. Hidden America: From Coal Miners to Cowboys, an Extraordinary Exploration of the Unseen People Who Make This Country Work. G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2012.
This is the origin of the “melting pot” term. Although British, Zangwill wrote this play for America and it was first produced in Washinton DC with Theodore Roosevelt in attendance. The theme was just the concept that most Americans think of relative to the large immigration of so many peoples to America.
It was on this date that for the first time in American History, the number of minority babies born was greater than the number of majority--white, non Hispanic—babies.
