Americanization; Citizenship; Speeches, addresses, etc.
I hold that in this country there must be complete severance of Church
and State; that public moneys shall not be used for the purpose of
advancing any particular creed; and therefore that the public schools
shall be non-sectarian. As a necessary corollary to this, not only the
pupils but the members of the teaching force and the school officials
of all kinds must be treated exactly on a par, no matter what their
creed; and there must be no more discrimination against Jew or Catholic
or Protestant than discrimination in favor of Jew, Catholic or
Protestant. Whoever makes such discrimination is an enemy of the public
schools.
HYPHENATED AMERICANS.
What is true of creed is no less true of nationality. 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 anyone 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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