PROBLEMS AND PERSPECTIVES OF ETHNIC IDENTIFICATION: WITHERING AWAY OR REAFFIRMATION?
EXPERIENCE OF A SLOVENE EMIGRANT*
Rado L.	Lenček
1.0. I have been asked to speak about the ethnic experience of a Slovene immigrant who came to America after the end of World War Two. This experience, shared by hundreds of young and not so young, educated, ethnically conscious intellectuals, has been different from anything lived through by our great-■grandfathers and grandfathers, East Central European villagers who came to the new world for work but returned home; or by our uncles and aunts who at the turn of this century followed them - but remained here. Unskilled laborers as they Were, with	no knowledge of	English, they	were	treated as
*bohunks«;	their children and	grandchildren	are	the »white
ethnics of	America,« as they	are usually called	today. The
generation I wish to speak about, on the other hand, was the first generation of educated Slovene immigrants in America, to some degree cosmopolitan, with some professional competence °f at least with aspirations to become professional, with some knowledge of English, and most importantly - with a different value system, ready to accept the challenge of the dynamism and the mobile world of the new country of adoption. It is the ethnic experience of this generation that I wish to address in this presentation.1
1.1	The process of ethnic assimilation is traditionally measured and estimated by »generations«. An immigrant of the first generation is an immigrant born in the old country; of the second generation - when born in America from parents of the first generation. Thus - father, son, grandson, great-grandson are four generations representing an optimal span of the assimilation process in society.
In smaller ethnic communities, such as those of Slovene--Americans, ethnic enclaves preserve their language in family life of their first generation, rarely of the second generation; slightly longer in religious tradition, but certainly not in public life. In formal and informal situations the communication in such enclaves is in English. When children leave home, they very often leave their ethnic communities for good. The higher is their education they bring to America, the longer they cling to their native language and »Slovenian« ethnic identity; the higher is their education they acquire in English, the easier and quicker is their Americanization.
In sociological terms every minority community in America, dominated by a preocupation with folklore, ethnic customs, dances, ethnic art, ethnic food, tends to preserve a kind of »residual ethnicity«. Even in Slovene-American communities which may be rightly proud of the fact that they descend from a high language-centered culture and society as the society and culture is in Slovenia today, this stream of ethnical culture gets steadily shallower and less able to act as a creative agent in the cultural life of the community as a whole. The fossilized ethnic life holds no attraction to the educated young ethnics who can give expression to their talents only through the medium of the dominant American culture.2
It is interesting that a spontaneous interest for roots and language in such ethnic communities also calls for a three-four-generation circuit. An eighteen-nineteen year old college student from such a community - he would be the first in his family studying at a university - would come to see me and would say: »My great-grandparents came from Austria and spoke a strange dialect; my parents spoke it too but they did not let me learn it. I only know some words, »hudič, prasec*, and the names of a few dishes, like »žganci, štruklji, potica*-But now I want to learn Slovenian.« Yet, the Slovene language he would like to learn, is not and will not be any more the language of communication of his generation, let alone his language of prestige. What changed is the attitude of this generation to family roots, to the language of its ancestry. The third-fourth generation of the »white ethnics of America« is eager to learn more about its past, though the
»intellectual curiosity« to discover this memory rarely raises above the sentiment of ethnic nostalgia.3
2.0 There are two questions we should like to address in this short presentation. First: in what exactly consists the ethnic experience of the generation of Slovene immigrants after World War Two in America? And second: why does the ethnic experience of the post World War Two immigrants differ from the experience of those who came before them to America?
My answers to these two questions, of course, will be tentative and personal; personal, because they grow out of an individual experience and a vision of an ideal role the intellectual elite of a small nationality could assume in multilingual societies of the world of today and tomorrow; and tentative, because they are intended to open up a discussion of what has so far been unthought and unthought-of, and then to devise testable hypotheses at a later stage.
2.1 The generation of Slovene immigrants we belong to, knows its national coordinates, its national record, its culture, its national symbolic world and its cultural-historical loyalties. This generation was educated in its homeland, in its national educational system, in a national language. Contemporary Standard Slovene, based on an urban usage, serving as a model to an all-Slovene speech community, a super-dialectal standard whose symbolic sociolinguistic functions (the unifying, the separatist, the prestige function) galvanized, as it were, the ethnic-national consciousness and identity of its speech community.
In relation to their life in America, the generation of immigrants we belong to, is - for instance - still ready and willing to take part and responsibility for teaching the first-and second-generation immigrants and their children in Slovene-American parochial Saturday language schools, or to organize and conduct their weekly ethnic radio and television programs, but does not quite like to live in their »tight-knit« ethnic gethos and neighborhoods any more. It feels that it cannot fulfill its own cultural needs and expectations in their neighborhood fraternal clubs, in parish bowling alleys, their bingo and picnic parties, in parochial ethnic shows and folklore festivals. As a rule, these immigrants do not belong to
fraternal organizations and their lodges, and at one point lose contact, social and intellectual, with the lower-middle class values and aspirations of their native ethnic communities. Szestaw Mitosz in his recently published Conversations most frankly but candidly talks of this discord between generations of old and new immigrants in America when he speaks of his »painful awareness of the incredible cultural crudeness of Polish-Americans*, and of his Polish-Americans in Chicago and in other places »with a lot of Poles - who came to his poetry readings to see a famous Pole to lessen their own feeling of inferiority
In relation to their life outside ethnic neighborhoods, the generation of immigrants we belong to, is much more cosmopolitan than its second-, third-generation counterpart, much more comfortable among the educated in general, with the academics; much more at ease in contacts with college and intellectual communities than with their own ethnic enclaves. In these contacts with professionals, this generation may very early develop an interest in cultural diversity of ethnic groups in America, a new form of cultural pluralism, by gradually unfolding a higher perception of cultural differences and a higher consciousness of its own cultural specificities. Refusing to accept ethnic assimilation as the final answer to the evolution of minority groups in America, this generation begins to toy with the idea of how to enhance its professional creativity and to increase the probabilities of its making a distinctive and significant intellectual contribution to the multi-cultural self-understanding of our society.
2.2	There is a number of possible answers to our second question: Why does the ethnic experience of the post World War Two immigrants differ from the ethnic experience of those who came to America before them? We assume that the arguments implied in this question can be generalized; we reduced them to three propositions. Each of them would require further analysis and as we should like to analyze them all here, we selected those among them which work contrastively between the groups of immigrants we compare.
First, the ethnic experience of a group of immigrants may depend on the nature, temperament and character of an individual, his ambitions and aspirations, his own cultural
history, his education - that is on the inherent, innate and acquired, inseparable pack of qualities which constitute his pattern of behavior.
One of the most noticable such contrasts concerns the attitude towards cultural life the old and the new immigrants know and live and their generational commitment towards two distinct cultural traditions: ethnic - ethnographic vs. »higher«, more sophisticated; two heritages: rural, village vs. urban, town; low vs. high, provincial vs. national in terms of their instructions; their loyalties to them, and the symbol systems they might feel subject to.
Language is, of course, one of the central, almost symbolic dividing lines here; on one side - a modern, normalized, urban, intellectualized, functionally diversified Contemporary Standard Slovene; on the other - a somewhat fluid, crude but colorful, uncouth but natural, dialectally tinged vernacular, provoking, I beg you pardon, slightly grotesque overtones when used in intellectual discourse of the third-, fourth generation educated old-timers.
Second, the ethnic experience of an immigrant may depend on his receptivity of, and on his adaptability to the new social and cultural systems into which he is trying to integrate, but primarily on the degree of his making his own way in America, his success, his personal affirmation in the new country.
The contrast here involves primarily the difference between the cultural atmosphere of the old country and the new world »ethnic-melting« communities in larger cities and their Wealthy suburbs. It is not that these immigration communities lack culture; the American Main Street model of culture, epitomized, as it were, by values and style dictated by the Media, by the »state of mind«, the »way of life« of American professional classes, is simply different from the model of culture the new immigrant is bringing with him from the old World. What he has been tought as culturally prized and valuable, important to notice in society, stable, absolute and unquestionable, is in the life of the institutions of the new World - business corporations, government, foundations, Churches and national organizations, in the life of their professionals - very often devalued, reduced to irrelevant,
speculative, questionable and dubious. Faced with a »culture shock«, the new immigrant may confront the new world antagonistically, with hostility, and be shattered. He may be crushed or may decide to return home, to the old country, and be happier thereafter. He may however accept the challenge, adapt himself to America and ultimately succeed in the new world.
And here we are with our third proposition: The ethnic experience of an immigrant or a group of immigrants may also depend on an immigrant’s cultural-intellectual and professional qualifications, his success in America and on his individual or collective ingenuity and ability to reach out with his ethnic identity from his personal micro-cosmos into the main stream of the American intellectual and professional world. Thus, we are coming back, tangentially as it were, to the underlying theme of our discussion: »Problems and Perspectives of Ethnic Identification: Withering Away or Reaffirmation«.
Louis Adamic (1898-1951) was the first Slovene immigrant in America whose English written literary journalism about his homeland carried the message: »I am a Slovene immigrant, a scion of the smallest nation in Europe, the Slovenes. Through centuries they possessed but two things which they felt completely their own and which gave them the status of a nationality - their language and their culture«? This message of a successful Slovene-American intellectual in the new world, seems to be the first personal, conscious self-appropriation of his own cultural history, a making conscious of what perhaps nobody before him in emigration had noticed about himself and of his people at home.
Then came the generation of Slovene immigrants of the post World War Two era, bringing with them their fields of specialization, some of them their specialization in Slovene studies. Challenged by a new interest in cultural diversity of America and by a new concept of a cultural pluralism, they soon after their settling in America returned to the fields of their professional training. Obviously, this return enhanced their creativity and increased the possibilities of their making a distinctive and significant intellectual contribution to American society. Needless to say that this generation had at least two advantages over old immigrants: they did not need
to waste time and energy on fighting the inner conflict as the sons and daughters of the second- and third-generation immigrants do; and they did not need to lose time and energy on professional selfeducation in their fields of narrower specialization in Slovene studies. In the mid-fifties, this generation of Slovene immigrants was already engaged in Work for the affirmation of Slovene identification in the new World.6
It was this generation of young Slovene intellectuals which defended the very first Ph.d. dissertations on Slovene topics in the prestigeous Ivy League universities in America. These were topics in Slovene history, language and linguistics, problems in Slovene socio-political and national issues of the time.7 While it is true that culture of the Ivy League universities is not yet the culture of America, the very fact that this generation of intellectuals who just settled in America, became part of the Ivy League circuit, symbolizes, as it were, a Slovene »first« in the history of ethnic identification of Slovene topics in American universities.
Almost concurrently with the affirmation of this generation of Slovene immigrants in scholary circles of America came the first serious efforts to organize publishing of scholarly information on the problems of Slovene existence, and of scholarly Works on Slovene topics - in English. The publications of the Slovene immigrant scholar and of his American colleague Working on these topics were now aimed at American public at large, at its broader intellectual community, specialists and professionals. I should like to summarize some well-known facts here.
In 1958 an »Editoral Committee of Studia Slovenica« was formed in the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Its task Was to set up a small publishing house for publication of Slovene scholarly works in English. The first publication of the new Studia Slovenica was: Slovenia in European Affairs; Reflections on Slovenian Political History (New York, N.Y. -Washington, D.C., 1958), by John Arnez; the next two most respectable volumes: The Conversion of the Slovenes and the German-Slav Ethnic Boundary in the Eastern Alps (1959); and Slovene Medieval History; Selected Studies (1962), both by Aloysius L. Kuhar. So far, a series of fifteen scholary works
was published by »Studia Slovenica«; they are part of every serious research library in the English speaking world.8
In the same year, 1958, a Research Center for Slovenian Culture was founded in Willowdale, Ontario, in Canada. Its first book was: This is Slovenia. A Glance at the Land and Its People, edited by Rudolf Čuješ and Vladimir Mauko (Toronto, 1958). So far, three books were published by the Research Center for Slovenian Culture, and again, they are part of every serious research library in Canada and in the States.®
Somewhat later, in the seventies, Giles Edward Gobetz (in Slovene Edi Gobec) created a Slovenian Research Center of America, Inc., in Willoughby Hills, Ohio. This rather hermetically structured Center for preservation and research of archival documents on Slovene emigration in America is publishing works on Slovene emigration heritage. Its first book, an Anthology of Slovenian American Literature, edited by Giles Edward Gobetz and Adele Donchenko, was published in 1977.10
In 1973, the Society for Slovene Studies was organized. Its primary goal was to foster closer communication among scholars interested in Slovene studies; to promote the dissemination of scholarly information on Slovene studies through the organization of meetings and conferences, and through the preparation of scholary works for publication. From the very beginning the Society has been an open scholarly association, a non-political, professional society, non-ethnic, uniting Slovene and non-Slovene scholars and intellectuals interested in any aspect of culture and scholarship dealing with Slovenia and Slovenes. Its first scholarly conference was in association with the 1973 American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies National Convention in New York; its theme was »Slovenia Today«; its participants: Viktor Antolin, Toussaint Hočevar, Rado L. Lenček, Bogdan C. Novak, Carole Rogel and Joseph Velikonja. The Society’s first publications were: The SSS Newsletter (1973-1978), Documentation Series (1975-1981), and Papers in Slovene Studies (1975-1978). Today, the SSS publishes its journal: Slovene Studies (1979-).11
3.0	These examples of the organized intellectual activities of the post World War Two Slovene immigration represent an evident departure from the model of the »melting pot« and its subsequent »ethnic Renaissance« among the »white ethnic« of
the third-, fourth-generation of American immigrational communities. On the other hand, its »reaching out« into the main stream of American intellectual and professional world in English language, the only language this world understands, still serves ethnic identification of Slovene immigrants individually as well as ethnic identification and affirmation of Slo-vene-Americans as a whole in our society.
A POSTSCRIPT. MORNINGSIDE HEIGHTS, OCTOBER 1988.
Where to from here? Everyone of us of the post World War Two generation of Slovene intellectuals in America, suspended as we are between the commitments to our families and children, to our ethnic community life around us, our loyalties and allegiance to the homeland, and the centrifugal pressures of our professional cosmos on this side of the Ocean, reached a Point of no return and a flagrantly contradictory future. The pluralistic personality we have been trying to develop for ourselves, would not accept any retreat into our ethnic Ge-Hieinschaft. On the other hand, is the pluralistic personality -as a new human type and theoretical model in the highly mobile world like the world of the United States - still possible? Or: Is under conditions of a cultural pluralism and a continuous ethnogenetic fusion of people, any ethnic identification possible at all? For how long - still? Are we not just deceiving ourselves when we speak about the perspectives of our ethnic identification?
NOTES
This paper has been prepared for presentation at the 20th American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies National Convention, Hilton Hawaiian Village, Honolulu, Hawaii, November 18-21,	1988. It was
presented at the panel: Problems and Perspectives of Ethnic Identification: Withering Away or Reaffirmation ?, chaired by Dimitrij Rupel, Professor of Sociology at the Faculty of Sociology, Political Science and Journalism of the University of Ljubljana, and sponsored by the Society
for Slovene Studies. A translation of this paper in Slovene, not complete, appeared in Naši razgledi 38 : 7 (Ljubljana, April 7, 1989), pp. 194-195, under the title Protislovna prihodnost Slovencev v ZDA; Razprave na konferenci Ameriškega združenja za slovenske študije.
1. A few terms used in this paper should be defined first.
The world ethnic (substantive) is used as defined in Merriam-Webster Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary: member of a minority group who retains the customs, language, or social views of his group«. In the States, ethnics (ethnic group) is, of course, a residual category, indicating those who are not white, Anglo- Saxon, Protestant, and are »meltable«. Here, the lower class ethnics remain ethnic (adjective) relatively longer that the »ethnics« educated in adopted country. Ordinarily, education means education »away from« the ethnic group. An ethnic identification arises when one places oneself on an ethnic chart: I am a Slovene, I am a Slovene-American. The term nation = nationality (not in the Yugoslav Constitution interpretation), is used as defined in Merriam-Webster Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary - a people having a common origin, tradition, and language* and capable of forming or actually constituting a nation - state (see under 6).
2. Rado L. Lencek, On Literatures in Diasporas and the Life
Span of Their Media, a paper presented at the Symposium on Contemporary Literatures and Cultures of the United States of America and Canada, Bled, Slovenia (Yugosla' via), 9-14 May 1988
3. Cf., Rado L. Lencek, O jeziku in zavesti narodnega porekla,
New York: Slovene Ethnic Heritage Studies Center, 1978
4. Cf., Conversations With Czesfaw Mtfosz, Translated by
Richard Lourie, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987; Cf., also Stanislaus A. Blejwas’ Letter to the Editor: Mtfosz and the Polish-Americans, published in The New York Times Book Review (November 22, 1987, p. 47) and Czesfaw Mifosz’ reply with a rather strong argument: »My bitter words stem from my knowledge about what should be done by the many-millions-strong Polish-American diaspora in the realm of cultural value -
yet is not being done. Perhaps by pretending everything is well one brings more harm than hy voicing a criticism.« (Ibid., p. 47).
5. Cf., Louis Adamic, The Native’s Return. An American
Immigrant Visits Yugoslavia and Discoveres His Old Country (New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1934); My Native Land (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1943). The quote is from My Native Land, p. 31.
6. For a first register of academic teachers of Slovene origin
in American colleges and universities, see Joseph Velikonja, Slovenski profesorji na ameriških univerzah in college-ih, Carbondale 1960.
7. Rudi Zrimc in 1961 defended his Ph.d. dissertation at
Harvard University: Slovene Conjugation as Represented in the Dialect of Ljubljana. Or, in the same year Bogdan C. Novak at The University of Chicago, a dissertation The Ethnic and Political Struggle in Trieste, 1943-1954, later published as Trieste, 1941-1954: The Ethnic, Political, and Ideological Struggle (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1970). Or, Rado L. Lencek in 1962 at Harvard University; his dissertation The Conjugational Pattern of Contemporary Standard Slovene, was published as The Verb Pattern of Contemporary Standard Slovene (with an Attempt at a Generative Description of the Slovene Verb by Horace G. Lunt) (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1966); or Joseph Paternost in 1963, at Indiana University, with his dissertation The Slovenian Verbal System: Morphophonemics and Variations; or Carole Rogel in 1966 at Columbia University with her thesis The Slovenes and the Southern Slav Question, 1889-1914, later published: The Slovenes and Yugoslavism, 1890-1914 (Boulder - New York: East European Quarterly, 1977) [= East European Monographs, 24]
8. Eric A. Kovačič, 1988, personal communication: »V kolikor
se tiče izdaj Studia Slovenka,Ti prilagam pregled vseh dosedanjih izdaj Studia Slovenka ima dve seriji, namreč Studia Slovenka, v kateri je izšlo doslej 15 publikacij, in Studia Slovenka: Special Series, v kateri so doslej izšle štiri publikacije. Vse publikacije so angleške razen Arne-ževe knjige Slovenci v New Yorku, v kateri je samo
povzetek v angleščini. Slovenian letters by missionaries in America pa ima uvod v angleščini, pisma sama pa so preslikana iz Zgodnje Danice in so tako v slovenščini. Special Series izdaja zgodovino Slovencev v Ameriki, v tem se loči od splošne zbirke. Studia Slovenica je začelo delovati v letu 1958. Nastala je iz debat v Library of Congress, kjer je tedaj delal tudi Janez Arnež. V glavnem si prizadevajo za izdaje Janez Arnež, Valentin Leskovšek in Erik A. Kovačič. Nima nobene formalne organizacije. Pomagali pa so tudi drugi, tako pokojna Toussaint Hočevar in P udi Večer in.«
9. Rudolf Čuješ, 1988, personal communication: *.Research
Centre smo ustanovili v Torontu, ko smo se številni nekdanji študentje in diplomiranci nekoliko znašli in začutili potrebo tudi po kakem kulturnem delu. Večina nas je namreč vsaj sprva našla zaposlitev samo v ročnih poklicih. Imeli smo - s pomočjo St. Michael kolegija, ki nam je sprva nudil prostore - precej redne sestanke, kjer smo obravnavali sodobna vprašanja. Krožek je deloval več let, dokler niso druge zaposlitve, skrb za družine kot tudi delo pri hranilnici in posojilnici ter pri Slovenski državi -spodrinile delo v krožku. Nekaj vpogleda v delo krožka nudijo Razgovori in razgledi, razmnoženina, ki smo jo izdajali v letih 1955-57 ... Publikacije so bile doslej tri: R. Čuješ & V. Mauko, edts., This is Slovenia, Toronto 1958; R. Čuješ, Ninidjanissidog Saiagii, ados, Most Rev. Friderik Baraga, Apostle of Indians. Antigonish 1968; R. Čuješ, Slovenia - Land of Cooperators, Willowdale 1985.«
10. Eric A. Kovačič, 1988, personal communication: *Slovenian
Research Center of America Inc., je vsekakor duhovni otrok Edwarda Gobca (podpisoval se je Egidij Gobec, nato Giles Gobetz in sedaj Edward Gobetz). Kako je v Clevelandu organiziral, mi ni znano, znano pa je, da je nekdaj eksistiral odbor, v katerem je bilo več ljudi. Center ima svoje prostore v Gobčevem privatnem domu, ima pa vse lepo organizirano in mu pri tem pomaga najbolj žena Milena. Center ima najboljšo zbirko slovenskega tiska v Ameriki in arhive z izrezki iz časopisov itd. o ljudeh, organizacijah itd. Če zasledi kakega slavnega človeka s slovenskim imenom, mu piše. Tako je odkril že razne
filmske igralce, baseball igralce itd., razne miss te in te države ali okraja, da so slovenskega pokol enja. * ... The most representative publications of the Slovenian Research Center of America, Inc. are: Anthology of Slovenian American Literature with sixty reproductions of Slovenian ethnic art, ed. by G.E. Gobetz and A. Donchen-ko (Willoughby Hills, Ohio, 1977); and the Slovenian Heritage. Volume I. Ed. by Edward Gobetz with the assistance of Milena Gobetz and Ruth Lakner, Willoughby Hills 1985
11.	Cf., Society for Slovene Studies, Institute on East Central Europe, Columbia University in the City of New York, Ten Years of Activity, 1973-1983, prepared by Ian Kelly in cooperation with Wiliam W. Derbyshire, Toussaint Hočevar and Rado L. Lencek (New York 1983) [= Slovene Studies 5, 1983, p. 3-103]; Cf. also: [Dimitrij Rupel], Informacija o Society for Slovene Studies, Naši razgledi 38:6 (Ljubljana, March 24, 1989), p. 163; and Janez Stanonik, Družba za slovenske študije, Society for Slovene Studies, Enciklopedija Slovenije 2 (Ljubljana: Mladinska knjiga, 1989), p. 364
POVZETEK
PROBLEMI IN PERSPEKTIVE ETNIČNE IDENTIFIKACIJE IZGINJANJE ALI NOVA POTRDITEV?
IZKUŠNJA SLOVENSKEGA IZSELJENCA
Rado L. Lenček
Slovenski izseljenci, ki so prišli v ZDA po drugi svetovni vojni, so se po znatno višji stopnji izobrazbe, razgledanosti po svetu, poklicnega znanja in znanja angleščine bistveno ločevali od slovenskih priseljencev prejšnjih generacij Avtor, pripadnik te povojne generacije, na podlagi lastnih izkušenj razmišlja o vprašanjih asimilacije slovenskih izseljencev ter med drugim poudarja, da ohranijo ameriški Slovenci svoj jezik praviloma v družinskem življenju svoje generacije, redko pa v drugi genera-
ciji, nekoliko dlje v verski tradiciji, nikakor pa ne v javnem življenju. Ko otroci zapustijo dom, zelo pogosto tudi za zmeraj zapustijo svojo narodnostno skupnost. Čim višja je izobrazba, ki so jo slovenski izseljenci prinesli v ZDA, tem dlje se oklepajo slovenskega jezika in etnične identitete. Čim višja je njihova izobrazba, pridobljena v angleščini, tem laže in hitreje se ame-rikanizirajo. Avtor odgovarja tudi na vprašanji, v čem je narodnostna izkušnja generacije slovenskih izseljencev po drugi svetovni vojni in zakaj je njihovo doživljanje Amerike drugačno od doživljanja tistih, ki so prišli v Ameriko pred njimi. Poleg drugega naniza nekaj značilnosti življenja generacije povojnih izseljencev, ki jim običajne oblike udejstvovanja prejšnjih generacij izseljencev ne pomenijo uresničevanja njihovih kulturnih potreb in pričakovanj. Svoj prispevek zaključi s prikazom dejavnosti te generacije na znanstvenem področju s poudarkom na prikazu proučevanja slovenske zgodovine, jezika, jezikoslovja in drugih področij ter delovanja ustreznih znanstvenih društev, posebno Society for Slovene Studies. Vsa ta dejavnost povojnih slovenskih izseljencev je po avtorjevih besedah očiten razhod z vzorcem »melting pota*.