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- A friend posted this quote by TR. For starters, I never understood Roosevelt's appeal to conservatives. He was wildly popular during his lifetime (my grandmother, the first female voter in Chatham Co. GA, voted for him in her first presidential election), and seems to remain so. But TR was a Progressive leftist. Most of what he stood for should be anathema to actual conservatives. I suspect it's the guns, which he wanted to restrict to others, btw.
But the sentiment here is wrong historically, and wrong philosophically. For starters, you have to understand it was said during WWI where there were many Americans loyal to Germany and loyal to Ireland who opposed US involvement with the Entente powers.
The sentiment is wrong historically. This country has always been a multi-lingual society. The Constitution was initially published in three languages because the Dutch speakers in NY, and the German speakers in Pennsylvania could not understand English. Martin van Buren was our first non-native English-speaking president. Subsequent acquisitions added French speakers in Louisiana and Spanish speakers in Florida. Additionally, influxes of non-English speakers meant newspapers and neighborhoods populated by Germans, Russians, Yiddish speakers, Italians, Chinese, Swedes, and many others.
The sentiment is wrong. Yes, assimilation was the ideal probably up until the 1970s. But after that the realization that each person has a lineage that is part of him and embracing it helps one live an authentic life reduced assimilation. That in turn has created a much richer society, and contributed to American culture.
America offers immigrants a proposition: in your private life you can believe, say, and do whatever you want as long as you aren't breaking any criminal laws. In public life you sign on to an American tolerance. If your boss is female you treat her like you would any other boss. If your colleague is a non-Muslim, you treat her like any other person. If you're an evangelical Christian, don't bring that into the workplace in an unwelcome manner. People with religious tenets that forbid or mandate certain things request a reasonable accommodation from others, not a wholesale restructuring around their needs.
This is a key strength of America. As Reagan said, it is the only country where you could get off a boat and proudly call yourself an American.
Bill Bernstein, formerly of Nashville, where he was the owner of Eastside Gun Shop, now lives in Sumter, South Carolina. He is a scholar with a BA degree from Vanderbilt University and degrees in Classics from Corpus Christi College, Oxford, UNC-Chapel Hill, and the University of Pennsylvania.
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