Response- Spark#1

I agree with the concept of immigration that Ashley discussed in her spark. For example, Ashley talked about the salad bowl concept of immigration; this concept shows that even though people did immigrate to the United States, they still held onto their culture and past.  I thought that this was true because as you look at immigration today, there are so many cultures that preserve their ethnicity without completely assimilating to an American way of life. However, I thought of immigration and how much it changed over time because in the past, it was not even close to  salad bowl.  I think of the Horsman article  which discusses the famous doctrine of the ideal American being a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.  To me, that doctrine was what promoted this idea of assimilation and caused so much conflict in the beginning years of immigration; if you were ethnically different from the WASP ideology during early immigration, you were looked down upon because you did not meet that criteria.   Although immigrants did come in enormous numbers, at times quotas and exclusions were placed on immigrants because they failed to meet the WASP criteria; it was during these years of immigration that immigrants did not have the opportunity to show uniqueness because it was not even encouraged. During this time, I could not see immigration as a salad bowl, I see being what Park said in the Gerstle article; that immigrants assimilated in order to strive for something that they could not find in their own country.  Immigrants wanted to achieve a hope of success and live that American dream and if there ethnicity had to be hyphenated with American and have assimilation then so be it.