It is just under a decade since the historian Theodore Hershberg, a close student of American minority groups and a founder of the then new Journal of Ethnic Studies, announced the demise of the “Age of Aquarius,” pronouncing at the same time its displacement by the “Age of Ethnicity.” In so proclaiming he also, figuratively at least, announced the passing of one of the oldest of American ideals: the notion of the “Melting Pot,” that social process by which the ethnic elements of American society would all be boiled down into a national cultural amalgam by way of their “Americanization.” In announcing the advent of the Age of Ethnicity, Hershberg gave tacit recognition to the fact that the melting pot model of ethnic group accommodation to American culture had now been pre-empted, officially and normatively, by the notion of “cultural pluralism.” There was no further need for amalgamation at all: each group was now to proceed to celebrate its origins, its distinct culture, and its fellowship in any way it pleased, as one of its fundamental American “rights.”

On reflection, it may seem that in some respects the timing of the Hershberg prophesy is odd, even perverse. Many specialists were even then about the business of eliminating ethnicity altogether as a major factor in American culture, pronouncing the vestigial ethnic elements in US society virtually “assimilated.”

If reports are to be believed, “waiting for Bakke” was the main preoccupation of the Washington press corps in the Spring of 1978. The case had been argued before the United States Supreme Court in a blaze of publicity, and, while the nine judges were considering the arguments, there was no shortage of commentators to “advise” the Court. As one of these “advisers,” Ronald Dworkin, noted “No lawsuit has ever been more widely watched or more thoroughly debated in the national and international press before the Court's decision.” Thus when Mr. Justice Powell began to read the opinion of the Court in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, a “hush enveloped the courtroom.” The audience was hushed but expectant because it believed that it was about to witness a judgement of momentous historical importance. The pre-decision coverage suggested that the Court was either going to give or deny its constitutional imprimatur to the principle of affirmative action or preferential treatment. But unfortunately the judgement did not live up to its advance publicity. It did not definitively decide the issue, in fact it decided remarkably little. True, Allan Bakke did win and the University of California lost. However, the fate of affirmative action programmes was not resolved, and indeed despite the Supreme Court's pronouncements in two further cases, United Steelworkers of America v. Weber and Fullilove v. Klutznick, continues to hang in the constitutional balance.

In nothing is the difference between the Presidency today and in the nineteenth century more clearly symbolised than in the matter of accessibility. Today the President is closely guarded both for reasons of security and to save him from unreasonable calls on his time, and what is unreasonable is defined pretty strictly. For example, Mr. Walter Hickel, when he was Secretary of the Interior, found it impossible to get an interview with President Nixon on a matter he thought important. He took the desperate step of leaking his views to the press, and was dismissed for his pains.

Such an episode was inconceivable in the nineteenth century. Everyone knows the story of the reception at the White House on New Year's Day, 1863. So many people called to shake hands with Abraham Lincoln on that day, as was their right, that when he went upstairs to sign the Emancipation Proclamation he could hardly hold the pen steady. And everyone also knows the story of the riotous installation of Andrew Jackson in 1829.

It was then considered highly un-republican, indeed dangerously aristocratic, for a President to seclude himself; and Jackson, whose predecessor, John Quincy Adams, and successor, Martin Van Buren, were both ferociously criticised for their airs and graces (Adams's crime was that he had installed a billiards table in the White House) was particularly careful to give no cause for offence.

The history of the United States has been described again and again as the history of change, motion and instability. From Tocqueville to Turner, from Bancroft to Billington, from Berthoff to Thernstrom, the accent has been laid on the dynamic — whether it be democratisation, westward expansion, immigration, internal migration or “Americanisation.” It would appear almost incontrovertible that by 1900 the American people were unsettled, in search of order, pressured by the “M Factor,” responding unhappily to industrialism. Yet a number of questions may be asked: where, leaving aside the American Civil War as a very special case, is the evidence of large-scale dissatisfaction with and rebellion against the status quo; where is the evidence that, as the nation expanded west and its institutions extended over ever wider territories, they weakened and fell into disrepute; why did the United States succeed in reaching the Pacific in one piece rather than as several republics, as some of the Founding Fathers feared? One answer might be that the American people formed a consensus after all, but that is not the argument here. It is not necessary to involve the whole American people in an explanation of continuities, for the purpose here is to show how conservative, stabilising cultural control was in one case successfully provided by the few and not the many.

The remarkable originality of Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer (1925) has been long recognized. From Sinclair Lewis's early appreciative essay onwards, the novel's significant advance over Dos Passos's three previous novels, its break with constricting convention, and its technical boldness have been repeatedly noted. Dos Passos's broad concern remains that of the traditional realist–the heavily itemized portraiture of urban social life–but in Manhattan Transfer that portraiture is energized and given fresh impact by new modes of description and new principles of narrative structure. These innovations have customarily been traced to the influence of modernist experimentation in the novel, and Dos Passos's debts to James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and Marcel Proust have been established. Yet an explanation of Dos Passos's conception of form which confines itself to literary modernism alone must be regarded as incomplete. Dos Passos's heightened visual sense and the marked painterly and cinematic qualities of his work indicate that it is to the twentieth-century pioneers in the visual arts, as well as to the pioneers in fiction, that we must look for formative influences.

Dos Passos enjoyed a lifelong interest in the visual arts. After Harvard he went to Spain to study architecture, and at one time as a young man he was unsure whether to choose fine art or literature as his main avenue of creative expression.