By Nordic race, Evans means that it is a race that despite all of its various faults, that is, he recognizes that the race is by no chance close to perfect but with flaws and faults. The Nordic or "American" race has managed to give the entire globe almost the whole of what today we term as modern civilization. The countless number of inventions in the today world is due to this Nordic race.
Evans claims that Nordic Americans were strangers in a nation experiencing “moral breakdown” because all of the traditional moral standards in the nation were decaying, or they were increasingly becoming more and more irrelevant that they lost their initial binding value.
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What the people considered as a norm, such as the regarding of the Sabbath as a sacred day, attaching holy values to the idea of home and emphasizing on the importance of chastity were all but cultures that people no longer regarded as sane. However, those that still kept on practicing the norm had they themselves regularly met with streams of constant ridicule.
The moral breakdown that estranged the people caused yet another problem that was economic distress, which dwindled the assurance for the future of their children. Strangers took over the control of the great cities and the industries.
Due to this moral breakdown and its associated problems, today people consider the Nordic American as a stranger in their inherited lands.
All these facts about the Nordic American being a stranger in a country experiencing "moral breakdown" was true for many years until came the World War I that gave them the first hint of what caused their real troubles. The war gave them a revelation that it is the millions whom they had allowed to share their heritage and welfare, and whom they had assumed to become part of them, that were in fact not as they thought. They all had other loyalties, and it was from this that the root of the problem boiled down to.
Evans wrote that the melting pot was a ghastly failure. By this, he meant that efforts made to change or teach the Nordic Americans new ways or new things were a complete failure. Even the Jews themselves who had come up with the term melting point found it challenging to adapt to new cultures and way of living. The Nordic American struggles to fit in and always puts his people first and only cares about what benefits him. The Nordic American views of the aliens was not that of admiration, but instead, they refused to acknowledge them as one of them.
Immigrants moved to America and introduced liberalism which the natives first followed without question. Later the Nordic Americans regretted and started to rebel against these ideas as they had lost their cultural beliefs and previous standards. They could not even pass and teach their new generations on their beliefs and standards since the influence of immigrants had breached them. Also, though the ideas seemed enticing, the Nordic people struggled to fit in and were distressed in the land their forefathers had left for them.
The authors view on immigrants is not those of admiration instead he sees immigrants as people who robbed the old Americans of their standards and beliefs. Riss and Jane Adams views on immigrants, however, differ to the authors. They view immigrants as people who only moved to America in the hope of living ‘the American dream.' However, for some immigrants, the dream for greener pastures did not come to reality. Some of them found themselves living in slum-like settlements surrounded by poor conditions. For a long time, Riss and Jane Adams have worked towards improving the terms of such immigrants.
