On Columbus Day 1915, a crowd of practically 2.000 folks crammed New York’s Carnegie Corridor to listen to Theodore Roosevelt explain 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 relied on its folks’s dedication to its distinctive ideas and heritage for its survival. In that wrestle, Roosevelt declared “there isn’t a room on this nation for hyphenated Americanism.”
His speech joined an ongoing, still-persistent debate concerning the nature of American identification — whether or not folks from different international locations may ever turn 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 america 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 one in all Roosevelt’s contemporaries, the journalist Randolph Bourne, known as its “unique sociological fabric” — many cultures “mingling, however not fused”?
The matter couldn’t have been extra pressing when Roosevelt addressed a largely Italian American viewers at a important juncture within the nation’s historical past. Because the First World Struggle consumed Europe, many People anxious concerning the loyalties of the nation’s immigrant populations ought to the U.S. enter the battle. Many People traced their ancestry to Germany and the lands of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that will turn into enemies; tens of millions of Irish People hated the British that will turn into america’ principal ally. How would possibly they react to a declaration of battle?
However Roosevelt’s Columbus Day speech mirrored a deeper, extra enduring concern. Between 1880 and World Struggle I, 20 million foreigners had immigrated to the U.S. Practically 7 million folks entered the nation between 1900 and 1910 alone. That amounted to almost 10 occasions the annual common for the 1850s, the earlier massive wave of arrivals. By 1915, newcomers and their younger, native-born kids made up the vast majority of many main American cities.
No marvel then that, originally of the 20 century, People questioned whether or not the nation may 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 risk; for these nativists, the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant heritage outlined america. 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 People,” he defined, referred to those that didn’t embrace the nation’s democratic heritage: Lots of the “finest People I’ve ever recognized have been naturalized People, People 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 loyal 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 People, who positioned themselves separate and above their fellow residents based mostly on ancestry alone. They’d hyphenated their Americanism as a lot as immigrants who nonetheless professed allegiance to the lands of their beginning.
However beneficiant because it was, Roosevelt’s civic nationalism didn’t welcome ethnic range. It pushed assimilation right into a single, composite American tradition. On the one hand, that inclusive imaginative and prescient allowed practically anyone to turn into American. Alternatively, although, Roosevelt insisted that newcomers discard their cultures. This melting pot model of civic nationalism forbade any sort of combined or twin identification.
A yr later, Bourne joined the controversy 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 battle he nonetheless hoped People may keep away from. The nation, he asserted, needs to be “what the immigrant can 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 elements of the cultures they delivered to 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 preferrred than the melting-pot,” Bourne envisioned a cosmopolitan, “trans-national America.” Embracing cultural range, America would forged apart “weary outdated nationalism” and turn into a brand new, completely completely different sort of nation — a tapestry of distinct teams residing facet by facet. Bourne discovered it unimaginable “to not be thrilled on the incalculable potentialities of so novel a union of males.”
This turn-of-the-Twentieth century debate reverberates by way of up to date political struggles. A yr in the past, Vice President JD Vance took up Roosevelt’s query in a speech at the Claremont Institute, asking “in 2025 what an American is.”
Rejecting his predecessor’s rooting of American identification in a set of “creedal ideas,” Vance attacked the concept immigrants who embraced American beliefs had a larger declare to citizenship than native-born People who rejected democratic ideas — whom some teams labeled “extremists” — although “their ancestors have been right here on the time of the Revolutionary Struggle.” America, Vance asserted, was “not simply an concept.” It additionally concerned ties of blood and soil; it was a “specific place with a selected folks.”
Greater than a century in the past, amid one other period of mass immigration and world 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 turn 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.
