Harvard prof co-wrote ‘Beyond the Melting Pot’

NEW YORK — Nathan Glazer, a prominent sociologist and public intellectual who assisted on a classic study of conformity, “The Lonely Crowd,” and co-authored a groundbreaking document of nonconformity, “Beyond the Melting Pot,” has died at 95.

Mr. Glazer’s daughter, Sarah Glazer, confirmed her father died at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Saturday morning.

A longtime professor at Harvard University, Mr. Glazer was among the last of the deeply read thinkers who influenced culture and politics in the mid-20th century. Starting in the 1940s, Mr. Glazer was a writer and editor for Commentary and The New Republic. He was a coeditor of The Public Interest and wrote or co-wrote numerous books. With peers such as Daniel Bell and Irving Howe, he had a wide range of interests, “a notion of universal competence,” from foreign policy to Modernist architecture, subject of one his latter books, “From a Cause to a Style.”

A radical in his youth, he was regarded as a founding “neoconservative,” a label he resisted. His most famous projects were the million-selling “The Lonely Crowd,” primarily written by David Riesman and a prescient 1950 release about consumerism and peer pressure, and the landmark “Beyond the Melting Pot,” which countered the core American myth of assimilation.

Mr. Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan examined five racial and ethnic groups in New York City — blacks, Italian-Americans, Jews, Puerto Ricans and IrishAmericans — and concluded that even as languages and customs from the old world faded, new styles and traditions emerged that reflected distinct identities. “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,” the authors wrote. “The initial notion of an American melting pot did not, it seems, quite grasp what would happen in America.”

The book was published in 1963 to immediate and continuing debate over its refutation of a blended society, over the authors’ belief that blacks’ struggles could not be blamed on discrimination alone and that blacks would eventually achieve the kinds of advances enjoyed by immigrant populations. “Melting Pot” has been widely taught, and remains a standard reference for urban and ethnic studies, whether the subject has been civil rights, education or city politics.

He was once married to writer Ruth Gay. Glazer is survived by his second wife, Sulochana (Raghavan) Glazer, three daughters, Sarah Glazer, Sophie Glazer and Elizabeth Glazer, seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

The son of Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants, Glazer was born in New York and raised in working class neighborhoods in the Bronx and East Harlem. He followed a similar path as neo-conservatives — from socialism in his college years to liberalism as a young man to an increasing turn right.

A deep skeptic about the effectiveness of government, Mr. Glazer was a critic of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society domestic programs and especially opposed to affirmative action. His 1975 book, “Affirmative Discrimination: Ethnic Inequality and Public Policy,” became a prime text for the “reverse discrimination” movement.