By Robert E.L. Walters
Images By: J.S. Pughe in Puck 1899 & Thomas Nast in Harper's Weekly 1870
Back in my Baltimore days, both before the Navy and after, I had a favorite restaurant in Mount Vernon called GAMPY's. Beyond its eclectic clientele and venerable staff, I appreciated what GAMPY's expanded to... The Great American Melting Pot, and that didn't just refer to the fondue which elicited cries of "hot oil!" as servers wove their way through the narrow premises, it spoke to the fundamental success of the American experiment. People of all flavors, textures and colors leaving their past behind to become amalgamated in a new national identity.
For as long as our republic has rolled along, the issue of multiculturalism and Americanism has perked just below the surface. The rapid westward expansion (and to some degree the compensating eastward expansion from the west coast after the gold rush years) gave the United States a need for both labor and settlers, a need however that was often met with dismay and bigotry. Even before this period, when we were fighting our War of Independence from Great Britain, Germans of Pennsylvania, Swedes from Delaware and the Dutch from New York were sometimes viewed warily by folks from New England and the South.
I bring up this last part to illustrate a point. racially speaking, its rather hard to discern English, Dutch, Swedes and Germans. Culturally is a different story, especially when those differences further center on religion and the majority of a country is Protestant and the minority is Roman Catholic, Jewish or Muslim to say nothing of Buddhist of Hindu.
If you think the immigration debate is a new phenomenon in the United States, the cartoon below was produced by Thomas Nast for Harper's Weekly in 1870 when the wall in question was against further Chinese immigration once the transcontinental railroad was completed and a need for more Chinese "Coolies" was deemed superfluous at best and critically dangerous at worst. Beyond the perennial tension of multiculturalism and Americanism is the very real concerns of multiculturalism and assimilation.
Although the term "Hyphenated-American" appeared in print as early as 1889, it really got traction when Theodore Roosevelt used the term in a speech before the Knights of Columbus in New York's Carnegie Hall on Columbus Day 1915. An excerpt...
"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."
I will add a few "hyphens" for President Roosevelt. "Gay-Americans," Trans-Americans," "Brown-Americans., "Arab-Americans." Can we ever hope to find unity in a country where assimilation is deemed at best "un-cool" and at worst antithetical to individualism?
Having lived in many places where racism is a thing, by which I mean the color of your skin, or even the gradation of that skin color consigns you to a certain class, I find American racism a hard sell. In place of "racism" we generally have "classism" centered around the belief of some that others refuse to "incorporate" themselves into the American melting pot.
This is a worrisome trend in the United States. If we move beyond the concept of hyphenation into Balkanization as we seem to be doing, disunion and disharmony are surely to follow. This current election is particularly troubling on both sides. The MAGA movement may seem to exist in a rarefied bubble of U.S. History, but only if you are not aware of the Native American or "No Nothing" Party of the 1850s. Just as disconcerting as the nativist rumblings of MAGA are the identity politics of the left. Creating "coalitions" of minorities (or fabricated minorities) to pursue a platform of victim-hood does neither the participants in those movements nor their causes any good in the long-run, since by their very nature, they are dis-including themselves from full participation in the American experience.
Since Vice President Harris has taken on the mantle of her party, I have read several pundits opine that if she loses, she too will be yet another victim of racism and/or misogyny or both. If she loses, it is possible she does so because she was the least popular candidate in a majority of the states, not just California and New York (which is why we have indirect elections for President in the first place by the way). And what would be the basis of such an assessment? Barrack Obama is black and was elected to the Presidency twice. Vivek Ramaswamy and Nikki Haley are both of South Asian descent and have run credible campaigns for President, Ms. Haley being a former governor, diplomat and cabinet secretary. This does not sound like racism against either blacks nor South Asians from where I sit.
If we as a nation want to get back on the right track, we need to stop hyphenating, class-baiting and making division where none really exist. Does someone having a billion dollars in their bank account really effect me? Not so much. Does someone playing Latin music at a backyard BBQ disrupt my world anymore than someone doing the same thing with Rap, Hip Hop, Country Western Music, The Violent Femmes, Sting or Lawrence Welk? Unlikely. All of us Americans want pretty much the same thing. A decent home to come home to after the workday, safe neighborhoods, reasonable taxes, and the idea that we're all in this thing together. If we move in that direction, the MAGA movement and the identity politics of the left will have no place to go but away. That is the beauty of the American experience and quite truly, the envy of the world.
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