On Columbus Day 1915, a crowd of almost 2.000 folks crammed New York’s Carnegie Corridor to listen to Theodore Roosevelt clarify what it meant to be American. Though the nation shared ties of blood and tradition with many lands, the previous president defined, “we’re a brand new and distinct nationality.” Possessing its personal “tradition and civilization,” the nation trusted its folks’s dedication to its distinctive rules and heritage for its survival. In that battle, Roosevelt declared “there isn’t a room on this nation for hyphenated Americanism.”
His speech joined an ongoing, still-persistent debate in regards to the nature of American identification — whether or not folks from different nations might ever develop into absolutely American, whether or not “Americanism” derived from blood or from a set of concepts. Then and now, solutions to these questions would form how the nation responded to the variety in its midst. Ought to the US prohibit immigration, shutting the gates to peoples completely different from its white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant majority? Ought to it, as Roosevelt hoped, mix a number of nationalities right into a uniform melting pot? Or would possibly it embrace what considered one of Roosevelt’s contemporaries, the journalist Randolph Bourne, referred to as its “distinctive sociological material” — many cultures “mingling, however not fused”?
The matter couldn’t have been extra pressing when Roosevelt addressed a largely Italian American viewers at a crucial juncture within the nation’s historical past. Because the First World Conflict consumed Europe, many Individuals apprehensive in regards to the loyalties of the nation’s immigrant populations ought to the U.S. enter the battle. Many Individuals traced their ancestry to Germany and the lands of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that might develop into enemies; hundreds of thousands of Irish Individuals hated the British that might develop into the US’ principal ally. How would possibly they react to a declaration of warfare?
However Roosevelt’s Columbus Day speech mirrored a deeper, extra enduring concern. Between 1880 and World Conflict I, 20 million foreigners had immigrated to the U.S. Almost 7 million folks entered the nation between 1900 and 1910 alone. That amounted to just about 10 occasions the annual common for the 1850s, the earlier large wave of arrivals. By 1915, newcomers and their younger, native-born youngsters made up nearly all of many main American cities.
No surprise then that, at first of the 20 century, Individuals questioned whether or not the nation might accommodate this large wave of immigration and nonetheless retain its nationwide identification and its democratic establishments. Many noticed the brand new arrivals as a mortal menace; for these nativists, the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant heritage outlined the US. Advancing a racial or ethnic model of American nationalism, nativists noticed immigrants as genetically inferior. They not solely undermined the nation’s racial purity, however additionally debased its tradition with their uncouth methods and pungent meals. Unfit to vote and simply manipulated by corrupt bosses, immigrants, nativists insisted, additionally threatened American democracy.
At Carnegie Corridor, Roosevelt attacked these concepts. “Hyphenated Individuals,” he defined, referred to those that didn’t embrace the nation’s democratic heritage: Lots of the “finest Individuals I’ve ever identified have been naturalized Individuals, Individuals born overseas.”
Championing a civic notion of nationwide identification, Roosevelt made clear that being American was not a matter of the place you got here from, which faith you practiced, or what meals you ate. “Americanism,” the previous president insisted, “is a matter of the spirit and of the soul.” It concerned dependable loyalty in occasions of hassle and devotion to the beliefs America was “based to perpetuate”: civic and spiritual liberty and equality of alternative. Roosevelt taunted those that emphasised their standing as native-born Individuals, who positioned themselves separate and above their fellow residents primarily based on ancestry alone. They’d hyphenated their Americanism as a lot as immigrants who nonetheless professed allegiance to the lands of their delivery.
However beneficiant because it was, Roosevelt’s civic nationalism didn’t welcome ethnic variety. It pushed assimilation right into a single, composite American tradition. On the one hand, that inclusive imaginative and prescient allowed almost anyone to develop into American. However, although, Roosevelt insisted that newcomers discard their cultures. This melting pot model of civic nationalism forbade any type of blended or twin identification.
A 12 months later, Bourne joined the talk within the Atlantic Month-to-month. Like Roosevelt, the younger journalist dismissed the racial nationalism of the nativists; such “belligerent, unique inbreeding” had introduced the nations of Europe right into a warfare he nonetheless hoped Individuals might keep away from. The nation, he asserted, must be “what the immigrant may have a hand in making … and never what a ruling class, descendant of these British shares which have been the primary everlasting immigrants, determine that America shall be made.”
Bourne discovered Roosevelt’s imaginative and prescient each unrealistic and undesirable. Immigrants naturally preserved many facets of the cultures they dropped at the U.S. They based foreign-language newspapers and faculties, supported ethnic companies, cultivated the “literatures and cultural traditions of their homelands.” Pleading for a “increased best than the melting-pot,” Bourne envisioned a cosmopolitan, “trans-national America.” Embracing cultural variety, America would forged apart “weary outdated nationalism” and develop into a brand new, completely completely different type of nation — a tapestry of distinct teams dwelling facet by facet. Bourne discovered it inconceivable “to not be thrilled on the incalculable potentialities of so novel a union of males.”
This turn-of-the-Twentieth century debate reverberates via up to date political struggles. A 12 months in the past, Vice President JD Vance took up Roosevelt’s query in a speech on the Claremont Institute, asking “in 2025 what an American is.”
Rejecting his predecessor’s rooting of American identification in a set of “creedal rules,” Vance attacked the concept immigrants who embraced American beliefs had a better declare to citizenship than native-born Individuals who rejected democratic rules — whom some teams labeled “extremists” — despite the fact that “their ancestors have been right here on the time of the Revolutionary Conflict.” America, Vance asserted, was “not simply an concept.” It additionally concerned ties of blood and soil; it was a “specific place with a specific folks.”
Greater than a century in the past, amid one other period of mass immigration and international battle, Theodore Roosevelt and Randolph Bourne initiated a still-unresolved debate over the which means of America. Ought to American identification be outlined by race and ethnicity? Or by fealty to a set of concepts? Ought to the nation operate as a melting pot that requires assimilation to a standard set of norms? Or would possibly it aspire to develop into a mosaic of various teams that retain their distinctive identities? Now, 110 years later, on the nation’s 250th anniversary, these questions stay undecided.
Bruce J. Schulman is a professor of historical past at Boston College.
