Roosevelt Saw the Storm Brewing Long Ago
Theodore saw the storm coming long ago. In 1916 in a series of Memorial Day speeches Theodore Roosevelt delivered in St. Louis the former President claimed he came to St. Louis to speak on Americanism—
To condemn the use of the hyphen: “whenever it represents an effort to form political parties along racial lines or to bring pressure to bear on parties and politicians, not for American purposes, but in the interest of some group of voters of a certain national origin or of the country from which they or their fathers came.
“The effort to keep our citizenship divided against itself by the use of the hyphen and along the lines of national origin is certain to a breed of spirit of bitterness and prejudice and dislike between great bodies of our citizens. If some citizens band together as German-Americans or Irish-Americans [or African-Americans], then after a while others are certain to band together as English-Americans or Scandinavian-Americans, and every such banding together, every attempt to make for political purposes a German-American alliance or a Scandinavian-American alliance, means down at the bottom an effort against the interest of straight-out American citizenship, an effort to bring into our nation the bitter Old World rivalries and jealousies and hatreds.” Emphasis and parenthetical comments added
—The Washington Post. June 1, 1916 “T.R. Assails Wilson.” p. 1.
Tags: character, hyphen, hyphenated Americans, liberal, liberals, New World Order, political, Psychosociopolitical Warfare, racist, United States of America