During the First World War the American sociologist Julius Drachsler observed how in the United States the conflict in Europe, fuelled, as he saw it, by a clash of cultural identities, could lead to tensions between immigrant groups that originated from the countries that were opposing each other. It led him to study the cultural elements of immigration and in doing so he became the first to use the term ‘cultural democracy’, which elaborated on the idea of cultural pluralism proposed by Horace Kallen (1915). In his book Democracy and Assimilation (1920), Drachsler points out that ‘the roots of the craving for democracy are […] imbedded in the instinctive impulse of self-assertion and of the desire for recognition’ (212). Drachsler saw ‘clear signs’ of a new type of democracy, built on the recognition of cultural identities, which to him was a reaction to what he perceived as the suppression of national cultural identities and values before and during the great European War. Whereas the suppression of cultural identity generates conflict, its acknowledgement, as well as the acceptance of differences between identities, paves the way towards a strengthening of democratic cohesion.