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Yeah, if you account for actual civil war, forced boarding schools for natives and other populations, "educating" religion, culture and language out of their slave population, fierce fight against hyphenated Americans since WW1, it was remarkably successful.
USA is not exceptional in this sense, many other countries did the same forced assimilation, except we now use different words for those projects such as Germanisation, Russification, Magyarization, Italianization etc. If anything, there is actually a European "melting pot" project not unlike USA - France. In the past it was very diverse country of many smaller nations speaking different languages and having diverse histories: Occitan South, Celtic/Bretonian West, Flemmish and Germanic North East and various others. France pursued aggressive assimilation in form of forced secular republican tradition and generations of focused public school education. It worked beautifully so much so, that by 1951 French approved usage of local minority languages in schools, firm in their sense of victory after centuries of the project. It remains to be seen if it was not a hollow victory.
I absolutely agree that this works relatively well - although even there are many exceptions. There are some very tenacious ethnicities like Roma, or Basque etc. It however does not mean that it will work forever, there is equal number of examples of failed assimilations and ultimate splinter of states even in Europe.
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