WHAT IS AN “AMERICAN”?
We are concerned just now, however, with the alien, not in his general legal or social relations, but as material for active membership in our community as an American citizen, as a voting participant in the sovereignty held in this country by the people. As such, he comes to a position unique in all the world. It is not yet true—perhaps it will be very long before it can be true—that there is absolutely no bar to any person on account of race; for the law and its interpretations exclude from citizenship Chinese, Japanese, and certain people of India not regarded as “white”—although the blacks of Africa are expressly admitted. Nevertheless it may be said broadly that, regardless of race, the immigrant can come to America and win his way upon his own merits into the fellowship of what all the world calls “Americans.”
Now, what is “an American”? What is it that makes a nation of us if not a distinctive race? What is it that the immigrant joins, body and soul, when he becomes “an American”?
Every little while somebody arises with ashes upon his head and bemoans the threatened disappearance of what he is pleased to call “the American type.” He never describes it—it is exceedingly difficult to learn what may be meant by the phrase. This is not strange, for there is no such thing if a racial type is meant. There never has been any such thing.
Perhaps we know what the expression might mean in New England—a combination of English, Scotch, or Welsh, who in turn would be bred of Dane, Pict, and Scot, Saxon and Norman and Kelt, with perhaps a strain of French, or maybe of Dutch. In Pennsylvania very likely it would be English Quaker—or Plattdeutsch. The French-Spanish combination in the Gulf region, the Scandinavian or German in the Middle West and Northwest, the Spanish-Mexican along the Rio Grande and in Southern California, and so on, are “American” by a title as good as that of those who trace their descent from the Pilgrim Fathers.
John Graham Brooks[5] remarks that “our piebald millions” are now so interwoven with all that we are “that to silhouette the American becomes yearly more baffling.” Says he:
The early writers have no such misgivings.... In 1889 I met a German correspondent who had been four times to the United States.... He said he brought back from his first journey a clearly conceived image of the American. He was “sharp-visaged, nervous, lank, and restless.” After the second trip this group of adjectives was abandoned. He saw so many people who were not lank or nervous; so many were rotund and leisurely, that he rearranged his classification, but still with confidence. After a third trip he insisted that he could still describe our countrymen, but not by external signs. He was driven to express them in terms of character. The American was resourceful, inventive, and supreme in the pursuit of material ends. “My fourth trip,” he said, “has knocked out the final attempt with the others. I have thrown them all over like a lot of rubbish. I don’t know what the American is, and I don’t believe anyone else knows.”
Prof. Franklin H. Giddings, in an informal address at Columbia University, undertook, albeit somewhat casually, to point out the characteristics which should mark a good American. He must be loyal, must “play the game”; must have a local pride not only in the quality of his country but in his home community, feeling and exemplifying a moral and civic responsibility for the betterment of conditions actuated by a wise and constructive idealism. Recognizing, no doubt, in the very saying of this, that these things would mark the good citizen of any nation, he protested that after all was said, and despite the difficulty of precise definition, there was something distinctive, perceptible, and, in fact, perceived by the discerning; real, however subtle and elusive, distinguishing the true American from all other folk—“a certain sensitiveness to the finer values of life; an admiration for these things.”
Well, certainly the ideal American is, and has, and does all of this; certainly all Americans ought to be, and have, and do all of it! But in all candor and fairness it must be acknowledged that it would be invidious and altogether insupportable to claim it or any of it as in any proper sense racially distinctive of America.