Nathan Glazer, a leading intellectual and prolific author on ethnic identity, civic participation, and a range of other topics, has died at 95.
Glazer died at his Cambridge, Mass., home on Saturday, the Associated Press reported. Glazer was among the last surviving members of a loose-knit group of public intellectuals, professors, and writers whose political orientations began on the Left during the mid-20th century and steadily moved rightward during the upheavals of the 1960s and beyond. They were widely known as “neoconservatives,” though Glazer resisted the term.
He rose to prominence with his 1950 book, The Lonely Crowd, written with David Riesman and Reuel Denney, which described a “new middle class” emerging in post-World War II America that was at once individually focused and oriented to participation in civic activities.
Glazer’s 1963 work, Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City, proved one of the most influential books of the decade. Written with future New York Democratic Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot challenged the long-held notion that generations of immigration to the United States would create a more cohesive and homogeneous culture. Rather, principal ethnic groups in the nation’s largest city maintained distinct, if changing, identities across generations, the pair wrote.
“It was reasonable to believe that a new American type would emerge, a new nationality in which it would be a matter of indifference whether a man was of Anglo-Saxon or German or Italian or Jewish origin,” Glazer and Moynihan wrote. “The initial notion of an American melting pot did not it seems, quite grasp what would happen in America.”
The book triggered a backlash over its skepticism about a blended society. Glazer himself rethought some of its central notions in a 1970 reissue, and his 1997 book, We Are All Multiculturalists Now, effectively declared the debate over.
A son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, Glazer was born in New York City on Feb. 23, 1923, and grew up in East Harlem and the East Bronx. He attended the City College of New York when the school was a hotbed of left-wing ideologies, but where many students criticized and shunned the tyranny of Joseph Stalin’s Soviet regime.
Several City College students of that era would rise to prominence as public intellectuals, including Irving Howe, Daniel Bell, and Irving Kristol.
Glazer later earned a master’s in anthropology and linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania and Ph.D. in sociology from Columbia University. He worked in President John F. Kennedy’s administration, in the Housing and Home Finance Agency, the predecessor to the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
But his government service was relatively short. In 1964, Glazer took a teaching position at University of California, Berkeley, where he took a dim view of the emerging free speech movement. He also grew critical of many of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society programs and opposed affirmative action.
Glazer moved to Harvard University in 1969, where he taught for several decades. At his death, Glazer was a professor emeritus at Harvard of education and social structure.
His Cambridge-based academic career overlapped significantly with his co-editorship of The Public Interest, a publication featuring contributors including conservative thought leaders James Q. Wilson, Michael Novak, Leon Kass, Charles Krauthammer, and a range of others.
