Teddy Roosevelt: "No Room in This Country for 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.”
“This
is just as true of the man who puts “native” before the hyphen as of
the man who puts German or Irish or English or French before the hyphen.
Americanism is a matter of the spirit and of the soul. Our allegiance must be purely to the United States. We must unsparingly condemn any man who holds any other allegiance.”
“But
if he is heartily and singly loyal to this Republic, then no matter
where he was born, he is just as good an American as any one else.”
“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.”
“The
men who do not become Americans and nothing else are hyphenated
Americans; and there ought to be no room for them in this country. The
man who calls himself an American citizen and who yet shows by his
actions that he is primarily the citizen of a foreign land, plays a
thoroughly mischievous part in the life of our body politic. He has
no place here; and the sooner he returns to the land to which he feels
his real heart-allegiance, the better it will be for every good
American.”
Theodore Roosevelt Address to the Knights of Columbus
New York City- October 12th, 1915
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