Hyphenated American – excerpts from Roosevelt’s speech

I am writing this on November 2, 2024 while sitting in my hotel room in Austin, Texas and attending the Explorer’s Club meeting. Election day is three days away and there is no clear front runner. By the time this is published the election is over so I asked myself what I should write about. The answer was clear. Unity and one nation should be the subject; not a divided America. I decided to select a speech presented by an iconic president that placed America first. A man that was placed in the office of the Vice President by industrial moguls so that he could be kept under wraps while siting in the corner of politics only to be thrust into the spotlight of America by virtue of an assassin’s bullet.

Former President Theodore Roosevelt, October 12, 1915, in an address to the Knights of Columbus, Carnegie Hall, NYC.

“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. 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.

For an American citizen to vote as a German-American, an Irish-American, or an English-American, is to be a traitor to American institutions; and those hyphenated Americans who terrorize American politicians by threats of the foreign vote are engaged in treason to the American Republic.”
Though this speech was delivered over a hundred years ago, the words ring true. As we finalize our election cycle that was filled with venom, hatred and even assassination attempts; let us make a new commitment to become an all-inclusive America where we have the opportunity to attempt the American dream. Whatever that dream is that is found in the heart of that individual American citizen.
God Bless America, God Save the Ukraine and Pray for Israel.