The welcoming reception that so many European soccer fans have received as they have crossed the nation in pursuit of World Cup games has struck many as a happy surprise of the summer of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

"The World Cup is at our shores, and all these people are doing us a great service," comedian Bill Maher posted. "They are reminding Americans that this place is kind of awesome."

"They are seeing an America they never imagined," The Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan noted with something like awe. "They expected a dark and brooding nation; they discovered a sun-filled magnificence. It's so big, so spacious, has such wondrous shops, the best food and absolutely wonderful people."

"We forget too easily," British-born American Andrew Sullivan wrote, "the loving, generous, beautiful culture that is still America at its core. If it takes a soccer tournament rather than a choreographed 250th anniversary celebration to remind us of that, so be it. We're worth celebrating no less."

Sullivan took special care to hail "the multicultural miracle we have already achieved in this quarter of a millennium." It's a refreshing contrast with the notion, widely prevalent in the pre-Trump years of this century, that America had suddenly, for the first time, moved from being a stiflingly, insensitively monocultural society to a multiracial, multicultural one.

When you go rifling back in American history, you encounter this notion time and again. In the years of peak Ellis Island migration from eastern and southern Europe, 1892 to 1914, you heard constantly that America was suddenly becoming — for some, dangerously becoming — multicultural.

In the decade from 1846 to 1857, when immigration as a........

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