Many non-Americans enjoy teasing Americans about our habit of identifying ourselves using ethnic and cultural descriptors from Old World societies. Looking across this nation, “hyphenated Americans” abound, from German-Americans, to Irish-Americans, Polish-Americans, Russian-Americans, Mexican-Americans, and so on and so forth down the line. A great many of us with English ancestry have never been to the sceptered isle of Albion, and many who trace their lineage to France wouldn’t know Camembert from Brie if their lives depended on it. They see us in many cases as gas-guzzling, burger-snarfing, terrorist-droning philistines. Our present identification with the American nation state erases many of the distinctions we might wish to draw. I recall a professor I had in college, himself a black man, who told a story about visiting South Africa and being received by his Afrikaner hosts not as a black person, but an American, the nationality erasing the racial descriptor.
Americans do this to each other to some extent as well. Teddy Roosevelt brought the phrase “hyphenated Americans” to prominence in his famous speech to the Knights of Columbus, thought it bears remembering that he appears to have been referring specifically to those who retained some loyalty to a non-American power. This country has as one of its great hallmarks the at least nominal lack of national identity based on descent from a particular ethnic group. From this we get the notion of America as an idea. Sign on the dotted line, and you’re part of the club whether your family is Dutch, Kazakh, or Chilean. This has not come, though, without its costs.
Coming to America and adopting a set of civic ideals and the commitment to liberty has not been enough. We have insisted also on newcomers adopting an American Way of Life. This has usually come down to expecting people to adhere to broadly Anglo-German cultural norms heavily inflected by the influence of the Protestant Reformation and a particular flavor of individualism. At one extreme, the Know-Nothing movement of the 1850s was really a Protestant identitarian movement that excluded from the category of “American” any Roman Catholic (excluding a small number of Louisiana Gallicans, but that’s a bit beyond our scope). Expecting homogeneity of any kind in a country as diver as our strikes me as unwise. While I think that Anglo bourgeois values are on the whole a good thing, I’m also aware that you can’t impose these things overnight even if you want to. People treasure their heritage and their culture, and do not let go of them easily.
Frankly, asking newcomers to adhere to an American Way of Life would be more reasonable if we could get some sense of what that actually means. Many of the denizens of Appalachia consider themselves just as American as those who constitute our dominant middle class culture, and yet they find themselves excluded from the cultural mainstream. Texas too, which can be said to be more of an outlook on life than a place, has a way of doing things not entirely one with the rest of the nation either. With New York City at one extreme, Amish Country at the other, and countless cultures in between, we are much closer to Austria-Hungary than to Ireland, Finland, or Israel in our diversity of cultural expressions.
Indeed, Texans, New Yorkers, and Appalachians have a sense of connectedness to place that rivals immigrant diasporas’ attachments to the culture of the “old country.” If you’ve ever met an Armenian-American, you know they can be very into being Armenian. For people who identify with immigrant communities and America’s regional cultures, these identities help define lifeways, and give a sense of meaning to their own history and that of their family. Histories, are the stories we tell that give form and purpose to how we live our lives. Deprive people of the story, and they lose touch with some of what formed them. The trouble with some of the assimilationist rhetoric we have in this country is that it sometimes asks people to cut themselves off from that history. German-Americans, for example, actively had their culture and language suppressed amidst an almost deranged fever of nationalism during World War I that would be remembered as a cultural genocide were it perpetrated against anyone else.
Whether one likes it or not, humans’ propensity to identify with particular groups internally and against the outside world externally seems pretty indelible. We can say that it has caused violence, bigotry and disorder, and indeed it has, but complaining that people like to divide themselves into groups is like complaining that the rain falls: it’s going to happen one way or the other. The most one can do is manage it, contain it. Throwing one’s hands in the air and saying “oh well,” though, is not an option either. Stable nations only form by identifying what unifies them, and agreeing that nothing unifies you is how societies fall apart. Reinvigorating a sense of civic nationalism is the only thing that could sustain a nation as diverse as ours. We can’t force people to be Methodist, or to like baseball, but we can ask that they uphold the values of our Constitution. And if accepting a hyphen before the word American is the price of doing that, I think I can live with it.