Hyphenated Americans

Hyphenated Americanism is nothing new. In reality, America has been wrestling with the controversy of hyphenating allegiances for the better part of the last hundred years. At one point in the early twentieth century, the controversy was addressed publicly by both president Theodore Roosevelt and president Woodrow Wilson.

And many subsequent Americans might have thought that the issue had forever more been put to rest. But the reality of resurrecting social ghosts is always present as it concerns the efforts of those who would sooner see America split and destroyed, than abandon their own singular egalitarian viewpoints of supposed multicultural fairness.

Speaking to the largely Irish Catholic Knights of Columbus at Carnegie Hall on Columbus Day 1915, President Teddy Roosevelt had the following to say on the issue of hyphenated Americans.

There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. When I refer to hyphenated Americans, I do not refer to naturalized Americans. Some of the very best Americans I have ever known were naturalized Americans, Americans born abroad. But a hyphenated American is not an American at all... The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that nationality, than with the other citizens of the American Republic... There is no such thing as a hyphenated American who is a good American. The only man who is a good American is the man who is an American and nothing else.

And President Woodrow Wilson's remarks on the issue were both poignant and prescient in my opinion.

"Any man who carries a hyphen about with him carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic whenever he gets ready."

Is there a more poignant perspective of what would come to pass in America, if hyphenated Americanism were allowed to flourish, than President Wilson's warning.

One look at our present society clearly demonstrates the realities and dangers that both Roosevelt and Wilson clearly saw almost one hundred years ago.

Someone once said that nothing is new under the sun. And as time passes everything old is new again. We as Americans, have gone from a time when what being an American meant was challenged and addressed and put to rest. Only to be resurrected again decades later by the latest incarnation of secular humanism masquerading as enlightened and revealed social justice under the banner of multiculturalism.

There is no social justice, as long as any group is allowed to carve out special privileges or status among the whole and then turn that special status on those not belonging to that group of the privileged. Nor should their be disdain or shame shown to any non hyphenated Americans for failing to cow at the alter of the false god of egalitarianism.

But that is precisely the point at which this country has arrived since the days when Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson both warned us of the dangers of societal secularized classification and the socially acceptable degrees of Americanism that we now accept as normal.