More Than a Creed: Who Americans Are

Ask what an American is and the usual answer is a creed: liberty, equality, the Constitution. Those ideals matter, and we hold them. But a creed alone can't make a people. Anyone, anywhere, can recite one.

When the nation is reduced to a list of abstractions, people go looking for something more solid, and they find it in sub-identities: Heritage American, German-American, Irish-American, Foundational Black American and dozens more. Theodore Roosevelt saw the same pull in 1915. His answer was a thicker American identity, strong enough to make the hyphens unnecessary.

A people you can recognize

Americans are a real people with a recognizable manner: how they talk, eat, worship, celebrate and carry themselves, from the rodeo arena to the parish festival to the Friday night football game. Most people, here and abroad, can describe an American concretely.

Strands, in proportion

That people was formed by specific strands. The English who planted the colonies and gave us our language and law. The Scots-Irish of the frontier. The Germans who settled the Midwest. African Americans, present since the colonial era, who built the South and shaped American music and faith. The Native nations whose names are written across the map. The Spanish and Mexican vaqueros who taught the cowboy his trade. The Irish, Italians, Japanese and others who came later and added their own.

Each strand belongs to the story in proportion to the part it actually played. No single strand is America by itself. The country is the whole weave.

A boundary that widens

The boundary of who counts as American has never stood still. In the 1850s the Know-Nothings treated Irish Catholics as foreigners who could never belong. Italians met the same suspicion a generation later. Today no one thinks of either as anything but American. Hispanic Americans are traveling the same road, through work, military service, faith and marriage.

This is how America can know exactly what it is and still bring people in. Newcomers are not asked to sign a creed and keep their old identity on the side. They are invited into a real people with a real history, and within a generation or two their grandchildren are simply American.

“There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism.”Theodore Roosevelt, 1915

What it means in practice

• No hyphens. Everyone who joins the nation becomes simply American.
• Teach American history and demography honestly and in proportion.
• Set immigration at a pace that lets newcomers grow into the inheritance.
• Celebrate the strands as parts of one American story, not as separate nations living side by side.