On Columbus Day 1915, a crowd of nearly 2.000 people crammed New York’s Carnegie Hall to hear Theodore Roosevelt explain what it meant to be American. Although the nation shared ties of blood and culture with many lands, the former president explained, “we are a new and distinct nationality.” Possessing its own “culture and civilization,” the nation depended on its people’s commitment to its distinctive principles and heritage for its survival. In that struggle, Roosevelt declared “there is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism.”
His speech joined an ongoing, still-persistent debate about the nature of American identity — whether people from other countries could ever become fully American, whether “Americanism” derived from blood or from a set of ideas. Then and now, answers to those questions would shape how the nation responded to the diversity in its midst. Should the United States restrict immigration, shutting the gates to peoples different from its white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant majority? Should it, as Roosevelt hoped, blend multiple nationalities into a uniform melting pot? Or might it embrace what one of Roosevelt’s contemporaries, the journalist Randolph Bourne, called its “unique sociological fabric” — many cultures “mingling, but not fused”?
The matter could not have been more urgent when Roosevelt addressed a mostly Italian American audience at a critical juncture in the nation’s history. As the First World War consumed Europe, many Americans worried about the loyalties of the nation’s immigrant populations should the U.S. enter the conflict. Many Americans traced their ancestry to Germany and the lands of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that would become enemies; millions of Irish Americans hated the British that would become the United States’ principal ally. How might they react to a declaration of war?
But Roosevelt’s Columbus Day speech reflected a deeper, more enduring concern. Between 1880 and World War I, 20 million foreigners had immigrated to the U.S. Nearly 7 million people entered the country between 1900 and 1910 alone. That amounted to nearly 10 times the annual average for the 1850s, the previous big wave of arrivals. By 1915, newcomers and their young, native-born children made up the majority of many major American cities.
No wonder then that, at the beginning of the 20 century, Americans questioned whether the nation could accommodate this massive wave of immigration and still retain its national identity and its democratic institutions. Many saw the new arrivals as a mortal threat; for these nativists, the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant heritage defined the United States. Advancing a racial or ethnic version of American nationalism, nativists saw immigrants as genetically inferior. They not only undermined the nation’s racial purity, but also debased its culture with their uncouth ways and pungent foods. Unfit to vote and easily manipulated by corrupt bosses, immigrants, nativists insisted, also threatened American democracy.
At Carnegie Hall, Roosevelt attacked those ideas. “Hyphenated Americans,” he explained, referred to those who did not embrace the nation’s democratic heritage: Many of the “best Americans I have ever known were naturalized Americans, Americans born abroad.”
Championing a civic notion of national identity, Roosevelt made clear that being American was not a matter of where you came from, which religion you practiced, or what food you ate. “Americanism,” the former president insisted, “is a matter of the spirit and of the soul.” It involved unswerving loyalty in times of trouble and devotion to the ideals America was “founded to perpetuate”: civic and religious liberty and equality of opportunity. Roosevelt taunted those who emphasized their status as native-born Americans, who placed themselves separate and above their fellow citizens based on ancestry alone. They had hyphenated their Americanism as much as immigrants who still professed allegiance to the lands of their birth.
But generous as it was, Roosevelt’s civic nationalism did not welcome ethnic diversity. It pushed assimilation into a single, composite American culture. On the one hand, that inclusive vision allowed nearly anybody to become American. On the other hand, though, Roosevelt insisted that newcomers discard their cultures. This melting pot version of civic nationalism forbade any kind of mixed or dual identity.
A year later, Bourne joined the debate in the Atlantic Monthly. Like Roosevelt, the young journalist dismissed the racial nationalism of the nativists; such “belligerent, exclusive inbreeding” had brought the nations of Europe into a war he still hoped Americans could avoid. The nation, he asserted, should be “what the immigrant will have a hand in making … and not what a ruling class, descendant of those British stocks which were the first permanent immigrants, decide that America shall be made.”
Bourne found Roosevelt’s vision both unrealistic and undesirable. Immigrants naturally preserved many aspects of the cultures they brought to the U.S. They founded foreign-language newspapers and schools, supported ethnic businesses, cultivated the “literatures and cultural traditions of their homelands.” Pleading for a “higher ideal than the melting-pot,” Bourne envisioned a cosmopolitan, “trans-national America.” Embracing cultural diversity, America would cast aside “weary old nationalism” and become a new, totally different kind of nation — a tapestry of distinct groups living side by side. Bourne found it impossible “not to be thrilled at the incalculable potentialities of so novel a union of men.”
This turn-of-the-20th century debate reverberates through contemporary political struggles. A year ago, Vice President JD Vance took up Roosevelt’s question in a speech at the Claremont Institute, asking “in 2025 what an American is.”
Rejecting his predecessor’s rooting of American identity in a set of “creedal principles,” Vance attacked the idea that immigrants who embraced American ideals had a greater claim to citizenship than native-born Americans who rejected democratic principles — whom some groups labeled “extremists” — even though “their ancestors were here at the time of the Revolutionary War.” America, Vance asserted, was “not just an idea.” It also involved ties of blood and soil; it was a “particular place with a particular people.”
More than a century ago, amid another era of mass immigration and global conflict, Theodore Roosevelt and Randolph Bourne initiated a still-unresolved debate over the meaning of America. Should American identity be defined by race and ethnicity? Or by fealty to a set of ideas? Should the nation function as a melting pot that requires assimilation to a common set of norms? Or might it aspire to become a mosaic of diverse groups that retain their distinctive identities? Now, 110 years later, on the nation’s 250th anniversary, those questions remain undecided.
Bruce J. Schulman is a professor of history at Boston University.
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