O. Henry's Cosmopolitanism; or, the American Collideoscope
2024; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 56; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5406/19405103.56.2.03
ISSN1940-5103
Autores Tópico(s)American Literature and Culture
ResumoAn essay about cosmopolitanism is no rarity. An essay about O. Henry (aka William Sydney Porter, 1862–1910) is. He is one of the great unknowns in American literature. I have not seen his name figure in accounts of Louisiana writers, though he lived in New Orleans for a time and situated a number of his stories there, nor in the many recent studies of American dialect writing, of which he is a distinctive master, nor certainly in discussions of colonialism or cosmopolitanism, despite the fact—maybe the only moderately well-known fact about O. Henry currently—that he coined the phrase "banana republic."1 Three of his books are short story cycles: The Four Million (1906), a panorama of New York upper and lower classes; The Gentle Grafter (1908), stories mostly about a renegade named Jeff Peters; and above all his first book Cabbages and Kings (1904), published in the same year as Joseph Conrad's Nostromo and likewise narrating the overthrow of a Central American despot. But despite their original popularity, these collections are seldom acknowledged in studies of short story cycles or of colonialism. This project arose out of a love for his stories, and the essay begins with demonstrations of his artistry. But mere craft is a minor virtue unless accompanied by insight, and so I move toward a characterization of the radical individualism expressed in the aphorisms that are my epigraphs. The diversity espoused in O. Henry's prolific output may not satisfy, but I contend that it usefully complicates the widespread binary thinking prone to assimilate individuals too readily into groups. The 281 stories in the Collected Works (plus others that were omitted) fragment life into particles that are not easily summarized.But isn't O. Henry the most formulaic, least unpredictable crafter of surprises? Well, yes and no. It is true that he turned Maupassant's frequent trick endings into a system that helped him complete an average of more than two stories a month for ten mostly unhappy, sometimes desperate, frequently drunken years. But I will have very little to say about the endings. The thrill of the stories lies in their bodies, not in their tails. In particular, as those who love O. Henry have always recognized (and as Margaret Cannell inventories in representative detail), it lies in their language.2 O. Henry read dictionaries obsessively; I know of no writer so intoxicated with words between Rabelais or his followers and Joyce. That's a large claim, not unrelated to the character of his cosmopolitanism, and I hope that the quotes in what follows will make it at least plausible, even though they remain mere drops in O. Henry's flood.O. Henry's version of cosmopolitanism starts with his wanderings. In his short life, he lived in North Carolina, various parts of Texas, New Orleans, Honduras, Ohio (where he spent three years in prison in Columbus for embezzling $854.08 and jumping bail), Pittsburgh, and New York. His stories feature many of these locales, and others as well. With all the attention that properly accrues to both underclass and popular writers at present, it is time to have another look at this vagabond, refugee, felon, alcoholic, abandoner of wife and daughter, who nevertheless shone forth in the second half of his short adulthood as among the most widely read American authors of the early-twentieth century.The range of settings has contributed to O. Henry's reputation as "quintessentially American."3 The Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock is one of many who wrote effusively about him, calling him "one of the great masters of modern literature": "O. Henry is, more than any author who ever wrote in the United States, an American writer."4 Even his detractors acknowledged him as a preeminently national writer. So, for instance, Fred Lewis Pattee conceded that "not enough has been made of the ingrained Americanism of the man. No one, not even Mark Twain, was more a product of our own soil."5 "Our soil" distorts the picture, however, for O. Henry was not a proponent of roots. His people are geared to move around. They are overwhelmingly travelers: rolling stones, whirligigs on the roads of destiny, to echo three of the story titles selected to name collections. Whether in New York or in the wild west, they largely come from elsewhere, or if they don't, then their families have. In marked contrast to the other great short story writers of his era, O. Henry doesn't tell stories about settled communities. Many of his characters have voyaged long distances, even to other continents. On trains, on wagons, on horseback, by steamer, by ferryboat, by cab, by streetcar, by automobile, on foot, they are always under way. In the great city they don't move long distances, but there even a few blocks can be a vast social difference. And they are constantly jockeying for position and for status. Though O. Henry is a writer of regions, he is thus not a regionalist (and consequently seems never to figure in studies of American regionalism).6 New York City and New Orleans are rendered with details of streets and neighborhoods, and Texas with attention to landscape, but the remaining real settings are mostly little more than names, not differing in substance from many other stories set in entirely fictional towns or establishments, not infrequently with merely comic names.7 The human context is crucial, and that means the character relations and the social spaces, while locale and geography remain almost indifferent to the dynamic.8 New York is "Bagdad-on-the-Subway" ("The Discounters of Money [RD 297, 298], "A Madison Square Arabian Night" [TL 1071], "A Night in New Arabia," "What You Want" [SB 1231, 1287]), and the empty canyons of Texas and the crowded avenues of the metropolis harbor the same character types: con men, social climbers, loners, sentimentalists, runaways—winners or losers all in the great contest of life. Their dialects and accents differ, as do their families and their fortunes but the nature of their interactions persists."The Gift of the Magi" is the iconic O. Henry story, the one always anthologized and invariably chosen for syllabi. Its domesticity is actually uncharacteristic in O. Henry's world, where young men and women are usually on the make or on the skids, and perhaps its relative distinctiveness has contributed to its renown. But Jim and Della, trying to stave off growing poverty, are still (to invoke yet another volume title) waifs and strays. Six very short paragraphs in, Della sees "a gray cat walking a gray fence"; the next paragraph alludes to a "very agile person" and "a rapid sequence," and in the next Della "suddenly . . . whirled," pales "within twenty seconds," and "rapidly . . . pulled down her hair." Then "with a whirl of skirts . . . she fluttered out the door."9 Even the rare characters blessed with their own dwellings are seldom at home, and pastoral repose is always—even in this idyll—a dream or an illusion. "The Gift of the Magi" is unusual in that Jim and Della don't come from and aren't headed to somewhere else, but still they have no roots. Indeed, the story would lose all its interest, or at least would be totally transformed, if Jim and Della had families. And like O. Henry himself and so many of his characters, they have undergone life changes, for Jim had a better job and lost it, along with the pretentious middle name, Dillingham, that he had once "flung to the breeze," evidently in an airy gesture of self-importance, but that has now vanished into thin air, leaving only his allegorical last name, Young, which positions him in life but not in society. Jim and Della belong to the city, but it is not clear that they belong in it; they are adrift among the four million.The entry to my theme will be the third story in The Four Million. But it is preceded by a preamble that can helpfully be retraced, though the selection and arrangement seem to have been made by the publisher, not the author.10 In "Tobin's Palm," which opens the volume, Tobin has been forlornly awaiting his sweetheart, who was supposed to be coming from Ireland with his inheritance in hand, and his story opens when a fortune teller on Coney Island (a favored adventure spot mentioned in the first three stories of this collection and in four subsequent ones) promises him a happy outcome to be brought by a man with a long name that includes the letter o. The man who turns up, Maximus G. Friedenhausman, lacks the o, but (evoking the author's pseudonym) consents to add it. He proclaims (in sophisticated yet absurdly accented English) that "me walk in life" (a telling idiom) "is one that is called the literary": "I wander abroad be night [sic, perhaps punning on benighted] seeking idiosyncrasies in the masses and truth in the heavens above." There is no question, though, where his sympathies lie: "The rapid transit is poetry and art: the moon but a tedious, dry body moving by rote" (FM 6). In this modern world in flux, anything can happen, and Tobin's seeming good fortune is to encounter his sweetheart, who has been working for three months in one of O. Henry's many eating establishments.11 But this surprise ending leaves everything undecided: is this moony truth or idiosyncratic reality, justice or illusion, good fortune or the realization that he has been jilted? A peaceful home (a Friedenhaus, if that isn't a fortune teller's euphemism for a cemetery, which in German is a Friedhof) is a Coney Island fantasy; you might win the lottery, but no one can ever know in advance. Such is the case in "The Gift of the Magi," which follows and which is as close as O. Henry ever came to an omniscient realist narrative mode, until an apologetic and equivocal first-person narrator pops up in the last paragraph, calling Jim and Della "two foolish children," yet also "the wisest" and "the magi." The narrator has so dubbed them. He—as if still Maximus G. Friedenhausman—is the illusionist blessing the couple. O. Henry, self-presented, pulls the ending out of his hat; believe it at your peril. Ending any pretense of realism, his endings snap the future shut: his very short stories leave no room for the happy-ever-after.12First-person narration, which sneaks into the last paragraph of "The Gift of the Magi," then takes over in the ensuing story, "A Cosmopolite in a Café," as if the author were continuing to speak in person. He—that is, seemingly, O. Henry—is fascinated with cosmopolitans but also skeptical of their ideals for, he says, "I held the idea that since Adam no true citizen of the world has existed" (FM 10). The closest approach, he believes, is "a great almost-cosmopolite," Rudyard Kipling, who "wrote for the whole world" but "dedicated himself to Bombay" (FM 11), following up with lines from Kipling's poem "To the City of Bombay." (The opening lines of the same poem are quoted at the start of another story, the plotless "Pride of the Cities" [SS 645].) The setting, almost cosmopolite, includes "garçons" and a "mélange of talk and laughter" in a scene that, according to "a sculptor from Mauch Chunk," was "truly Parisian" (FM 11).13 E. Rushmore Coglan, the café cosmopolite, appears to be the answer to O. Henry's skepticism, flaunting his rushed globe-trotting in a glamorous midnight display and rebuffing a question about his origin as irrelevant to his identity. Coglan scorns "all this petty pride in one's city or state or section or country" so that "we'll all be citizens of the world, as we ought to be" (FM 12). But the show proves to be more moonshine when he is unmasked as a rabid defender of his hometown, with his speech, as reported by the narrator, abruptly collapsing into a local vulgate: "Mattawamkeag, Maine, he said . . . , and he wouldn't stand for no knockin' the place" (15).14Like many in his era, O. Henry was a nationalist who distrusted and disliked cosmopolitans. Clancy, one of the unsavory adventurers in Cabbages and Kings, "was an American with an Irish diathesis and cosmopolitan proclivities" and "the roadster's blood . . . in his veins" ("Fox-in-the-Morning," CK 480); he is duped into doing hard labor for the upstart General De Vega and dupes the general in return when they escape back to New Orleans. Following in Clancy's line, there is also Bryan Jacks in "A Poor Rule" a world-traveling ne'er-do-well and a big talker with a chip on his shoulder. "Compared with him as a cosmopolite, the Wandering Jew would have seemed a mere hermit. He had learned everything the world could teach him, and he would tell you about it" (O 624). Yet when confronted with the rich girl who fancies herself a singer, he superciliously gives her bare-knuckled truth: "Nix for the gargle work" (O 628) is his summary judgment before she runs off without him or his companions. In his exit, you hear a tramp speaking, nothing grander.Of all O. Henry's designated cosmopolites, only another tramp, Raggles in "The Making of a New Yorker" (TL 1097–1100), is not a fraud; indeed, the narrator lauds him constantly as a poet. To be sure, he arrives by ferry "with the blasé air of a cosmopolite . . . dressed with care to play the rôle of an 'unidentified man.' No country, race, class, clique, union, party clan, or bowling association could have claimed him." He "wandered into the great city," O. Henry writes, "with the ardor of an astronomer discovering a new planet in the chorus of the milky way." Yet in fact his cosmopolitanism is actually only domestic, not international, let alone cosmic. His "Odyssey, which would have been a Limerick, had it been written"—hence a pretentiously petty, raggedly cosmopolitan exercise—has left him smitten with Chicago, Pittsburgh, New Orleans, and Boston, even Louisville and St. Louis, but frankly terrified by "the spirit of absolute egotism" that blasts at him in New York, and he does not hide his fear. But when he is run over, hundreds of people rush to help him and he is remade as a passionate New Yorker after all, falling in love with a place, not the world. There is one other cosmopolite, this one again a fake, but with a happy ending once she comes off her stilts. This is Madame Beaumont of "Transients in Arcadia," not self-proclaimed, to be sure, but "there was an untraceable rumor in the Hotel Lotus that Madame was a cosmopolite." Here she meets Harold Farrington, with the "expression . . . of a poised and sophisticated man of the world" (VC 1035). Happily, they are both merely wage earners on a fling, and as they leave Lotusland, they confess their true names to one another and depart friends, planning a joint trip to Coney Island.Coney Island, not the world, is the genuine escape hatch from the real New York, the magic place where Tobin finds his palmist, where Della fears that Jim will relegate her after seeing her hair cut, where O. Henry thinks that the café cosmopolite "will be heard from next summer" (FM 11) now that he has been unmasked, the place where some fulfill their dreams and others their nightmares. New York is the capital not just of O. Henry's country, nor even of his world, but of his universe. In "A Lickpenny Lover," Irving Carter, "painter, millionaire, traveller, poet, automobilist," apparently genuine if too well-bred for his own good, falls for a shopgirl and offers her Europe, India, Japan, "a shore where summer is eternal, where the waves are always rippling on the lovely beach and the people are happy and free as children" (VC 983, 986). But Irving and Masie speak different languages—an ever-present characteristic of O. Henry's New York—and she spurns him, thinking he is offering her a wedding tour at Coney Island. The story gives no indication that Carter is a fraud but his worldliness still leaves him out to lunch.O. Henry's hostility toward cosmopolitanism is, however, also a fascination. His stories are full of travelers on the open roads of the United States, hankering for novelty. They may not be citizens of the world but they would like to be. "I walked the streets of the city of Insolence," one begins, "thirsting for the sight of a stranger face. For the City is a desert of familiar types" (RS 735). The narrator meets an old acquaintance, Kansas Bill, who tells of having been swooped off in a steamer, following Barney O'Connor in a mission to "liberat[e] an undiscovered country [that] looked as tropical and dolce far ultra as the pictures of Lake Ronkonkoma in the brochure of the passenger department of the Long Island Railroad." There, Bill continues, he and Barney ate in "the Hotel Inglés, a beanery run on the American plan by a German proprietor with Chinese cooking served à la Kansas City lunch counter" (RS 737). But the idyll failed, as idylls generally do in O. Henry, the revolution proved abortive, and they returned to New York and its lively encounters.The allure of cosmopolitanism and its troubles are likewise both on evidence in "Sociology in Serge and Straw," set in Fishampton at the millionaire Van Plushvelt retreat named "Dolce far Niente" (W 886–90). As in "A Ruler of Men," the idyll proves fishy. Teenaged Haywood Van Plushvelt encounters "Smoky" Dodson, "worst boy in Fishampton"; the two engage in mutual taunts in their incompatible dialects—"'Wot's a cad,' asked 'Smoky,'" in ignorance of society jargon, and then they fight. Haywood fulfills a lifelong dream by joining Smoky's baseball team. News reports proclaim "the millennium of democracy" and "the tocsin call that proclaimed the universal brotherhood of man." But instead of brotherhood, as the narrator points out to a pretentious academic sociologist, there is only the world "going round and round in circles," for now Haywood sits on the ground "in a ragged red sweater," while "on a bench, with an air, sat the young millionaire's chum . . . dressed in a neat suit of dark blue serge" and accessories to match. "Smoky" opts out as Haywood plunges in. World unity remains a dream unmasked as escapism.Cosmopolitanism is a delusion because it is self-contradictory. The cosmos is not a polis. Or as Gayatri Spivak has written in a spirited essay arguing that cosmopolitanism begins in the nation, "No one lives in the global village."15 O. Henry's two French stories are set in comic-book empires, with "Tracked to Doom" (RS 793–97) perhaps the silliest prose he ever penned. And while he had been to Latin America, the Honduras of Cabbages and Kings is a domain of fakery that pops like a balloon. Restless emigres abound but no one is at home. "It is true," says the pretend general, that I am fleeing the country. But, receive the assurance that I care very little for that. Courts and camps everywhere are open to Sabas Placido. Vaya! what is this molehill of a republic—this pig's head of a country—to a man like me? I am a paisano of everywhere. In Rome, in London, in Paris, in Vienna, you will hear them say: "Welcome back, Don Sabas." ("The Flag Paramount," CK 478)A "paisano" of everywhere is, by definition, a peasant of nowhere. In European antiquity, claiming to be a citizen of the world was a stoic response to exile,16 and so it is here. But O. Henry's typical characters are soldiers of fortune, not stoics nor superior beings. "We hear of [cosmopolites]," says the narrator of "A Cosmopolite in a Café" and we see foreign labels on much luggage, but we find travelers instead of cosmopolites (FM 10).O. Henry has no truck with the old (and still or again widespread) lotusland ideal of the world citizen rising above his messy environment. There is no escape from the pseudo-republic's moles. So it is in "La Paz the Beautiful, a little harborless town smothered in a living green ribbon that banded the foot of a cloud-piercing mountain," which is unfortunately tyrannized by "Kalb, the vice-consul, a Graeco-Armenian citizen of the United States, born in Hesse-Darmstadt, and educated in Cincinnati ward primaries, [who] considered all Americans his brothers and bankers" ("The World and the Door," W 854). Even in the Texas wilds, old acquaintances bump into one another, not always peacefully; cosmopolitanism as escape doesn't work. Nor does the alternative ideal of cosmopolitanism as a melting pot. In New Orleans, proverbially a melting pot,17 Whistling Dick "collided with a mountain of blue and brass," a German policeman named Fritz, who speaks an almost incomprehensible lingo ("Whistling Dick's Christmas Stocking," RD 402). And in "Hostages to Momus" the narrator and his "pardner" Caligula, a Creek Indian, are kicked out of Mexico, bounce through "San Antone," pick up a Frenchman named Adolph McCarty in New Orleans before "the johndarms" run them out of town, and then, "When we become revised, we find that we have collided up against the State of Georgia," welcomed (so to speak) by a landlord who is "Hongkong in complexion" (GG 263). There are no shangri-las in O. Henry's America, and certainly not for what one character in "A Ruler of Men" calls "the provincial who has eaten the Broadway lotus." Barney O'Connor, locally known in his fractured Spanish as "El Library Door," is no liberador. For in O. Henry's world fulfillment does not come where the literary imagination meets political utopia. Rather, Barney now exhibits "his irresistible genius as a ruler of men" at the subway door, where all the world mingles: "With his knees, with his elbows, with his shoulders, with his resistless feet he shoved, crushed, slammed, heaved, kicked, flung, pounded the overplus of passengers aboard" (RS 745). Such is O. Henry's riposte to cosmopolitan pretensions, the society that he celebrates and that I have dubbed the American collideoscope.For the global village exists after all; it is a roughhouse place called New York. O. Henry's citizens may be provincial in the extreme, but his America, composed of the citizens of countless provinces, is cosmopolitan, even if its citizens are not. All the world, in O. Henry's vision, means people from all over the United States. And the people from the U.S. have overwhelmingly come from elsewhere. They are Frenchmen and Germans and Dagoes and Irish and Polockers and Russians and Swedes and Jews and Japanese and Chinamen and, of course, Mexicans and Cubans and Creoles and South Americans and Negroes (not many, and more often called "niggers" or "nigger-men"),18 to all of whom should be added the Indians from numerous tribes. They do not shed their identities when they immigrate or migrate internally; nor do they lose their linguistic peculiarities, whether foreign or regional or inflected by class and by education, real or sham. The thrill of the stories lies in the rush that bursts into life whenever characters leave home for the roads, the streets, and the public assembly places. O. Henry's America always fosters surprising encounters. Its glory is that we are all alike foreigners.E pluribus unum was celebrated far and wide in O. Henry's era. It inspired Walt Whitman's vision of this "teeming nation of nations" in the second paragraph of the preface to Leaves of Grass. Nathaniel Hawthorne, in a much less familiar passage, has a character praise its "endless intermixture of nationalities [that has] created a new and decidedly original type of national character."19 Closer to O. Henry's time, W. D. Howells celebrated the mixing of classes destined, he hoped, "to prove a common ground among classes and individuals" in which all Americans speak a common language "which stems from and refers to a shared social reality."20 But citizens of the world are never at home, and O. Henry's characters share only their diversity; they can all get on the train only because the doors bang open to intruding jargons, pushing, shoving, clashing.The citizen of the world was an ideal figure rising above national and communal distinctions. He was superior to time and place, wise and ethical, and (in different versions) generous or condescending to his fellow man. This version of the cosmopolitan was the ancestor of the genteel snob who was ridiculed by O. Henry and others, but who remained current among the group that has been called the Boston Cosmopolitans.21 Perhaps their most characteristic expression is by William James in "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings" (1899), where he adduces a letter of Whitman sounding like a snob, praising Broadway as "a sort of living, endless panorama—shops and splendid buildings and great windows: on the broad sidewalks crowds of women richly dressed continually passing, altogether different, superior in style and looks from any to be seen anywhere else," and so on at some length.22 By the early-twentieth century and emphatically after the Great War, the version of cosmopolitanism fostered by good breeding was on its way out, having been unmasked as nationalism and racism or subverted by the inverted classism of left-wing internationalism.23 In recent decades, however, it has been replaced by many versions of the so-called "new cosmopolitanism" that combine ideals of outreach and cultural understanding with recognitions of one's limitations cultural, national, and otherwise. Promulgated and much debated by social thinkers including James Clifford and David Hollinger, philosophers including Kwame Anthony Appiah and Martha Nussbaum, and literary theorists such as Bruce Robbins, the essays, anthologies, and monographs by these writers differ on the value of group identity, hybridity or multiple adherence (with respect to gender as well as to ethnicity, in an era when the cosmopolitan is no longer assumed to be male), and individual responsibility. Their views and their debates have contributed notably to contesting reductive us vs. them polarizations. But they all continue to advocate ethical positions supplemented by pragmatic solutions. That is to say, they continue to treat cosmopolitanism as an aspirational ideal for individuals. They approach cosmopolitanism through the lens of cosmopolitans.24The kind of cosmopolites that O. Henry loathed are socially or economically exalted. But the new cosmopolitans are also special individuals, ethically privileged and offering a model for all of us. O. Henry's characters are not individuals in this fashion. The thoughtful indirect discourse featured in "The Gift of the Magi" is rare in his output. Thinking in his stories seldom means serious reflection but rather, normally, nothing more than having a notion or an impression.25 He is a chronicler, not anything like Walter Benjamin's wise storyteller. As he says at one point, "I play no spy; nor do I assume to master the thoughts of any human heart; but I assert, by the chronicler's right, that before a quarter of an hour had sped, Sandridge was teaching her how to plait a six-strand rawhide stake-rope" ("The Caballero's Way," HW 158). He is attentive to dress rather than to physiognomy and to public rather than private spaces. And while ethnicities are incessantly labeled, they identify nothing more than provenance and speech habits, which indeed, as some of the preceding examples have illustrated, can be crazily mixed. Yet no one rises above his background. There is no innocent or pure selfhood to model autonomy. Even the occasional children are as wily as adults—like "Smoky" Dodson confronting Haywood Van Plushvelt and especially the hilarious Johnny "Red Chief" Dorset in "The Ransom of Red Chief" (W 891–97), who drives his kidnappers so crazy that they finally pay his father a ransom to take him back. Reality triumphs over pretense and inner essence alike.One image of collective cosmopolitanism is the melting pot. The term became a cliché following Israel Zangwill's play of that title, produced on Broadway in 1909, too late to influence O. Henry. The melting pot was originally associated with regeneration; it was an "ethnic variation on a religious theme."26 But over time it has tended to arouse suspicion, as assimilation comes into conflict with identity. In its place, the somewhat earlier term kaleidoscope has resurfaced as a characterization of cosmopolitanism, especially (though not exclusively) in its domestic or national contexts. "No more rank, title, or race. . . . All is mixed, confused, blurred, reshuffled, in a kaleidoscopic vision": so reads one version from the era.27 A yet earlier one, from a review of German ballad poetry in a Dublin magazine, is even more telling: the "cosmopolitan kaleidoscope" of Ferdinand Freiligrath's poems "frequently make[s] us sympathize with life, adventure, and suffering in remote parts of the earth, in all zones and climates. In turning over his pages, you make a poetic voyage around the world, arctic and equatorial, bathe in its climates, gain glimpses of its life on sea and land, sunshine and snow. How varied and glorious is the panorama of the world!"28 O. Henry's world is frequently called kaleidoscopic; indeed, the most serious academic student of O. Henry in recent decades has written of "the excitement he must have felt in the presence of Manhattan's kaleidoscopic scene,"29 and many similar phrases can readily be found online. And such views of the world as a splendid (or falsely showy) array of life and color persist to this day, as in the following, much-debated passage from a proponent of globalist fusion: "Suppose first, that a freewheeling cosmopolitan life, lived in a kaleidoscope of cultures, is both possible and fulfilling. Suppose such a life turns out to be rich and creative, and with no more unhappiness than one expects to find anywhere in human existence."30 And they have been particularly popular in application to the United States, academically enshrined Fuchs' The American Kaleidoscope. But perhaps a melting pot by any other name would smell the same.Etymologically, the word kaleidoscope, coined in 1817, means a view of beautiful forms. And so it usually appears. Still, there are also resistant voices. One particularly relevant one is a notably grim kaleidoscope in a story by Zangwill: He had hitherto taken scant notice of all these P
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