AMERICANS: Don't hyphenate people

Theodore Roosevelt once said: “There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. 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 … 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.”

Roosevelt hit the nail on the head here. If you have seen some of the older westerns, you may have run across one that contained “Irish-Americans” and their fight for equality. These were some of the first immigrants and they were not treated equally because people “hyphenated” them and did not consider them equal Americans.

This is one of the big problems with America: We take these immigrants that are now Americans and hyphenate them with titles so that we cannot see them as equal. The truth is, and Roosevelt nailed this, is that when they came over and became Americans they are Americans now, nothing else. He said that hyphenating them would divide us apart, and it has.

Roosevelt did give a solution to our problem of those who really are not Americans, though they call themselves as such: “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.”

JACOB HOWARD

Priest River