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Ah ya I did mix up the motte and bailey.
Anyways most of the US was settled by 1870, some parts were a little more filled in, and they were done by 1900. That's why I like civil war as a good cutoff. Plus the civil war shaped the nation just as heavily as the revolutionary war.
We have above us an example of a more American person than most actual Americans.
My ancestors founded this country, and it was based on an idea, not blood. A bunch of nationalist and monarch loving central Europeans started coming over in the 1900's and started trying to make it all about blood. If it's blood then the English, the Dutch, and the descendants of slaves can stay and everyone else can fuck off.
A bunch of them even think that fighting in European and Asian wars (aka every 20th century war) should grant them special consideration. Yuck.
My ancestors founded this country and trying to explain to them it's not about blood and their posterity but about "an idea," would leave them very puzzled. And to be frank, I would be pretty shocked if your ancestors didn't either. The writings of the time, e.g., a relative of mine died in King Phillip's War, make it pretty clear they were concerned with blood at least as a rally against the Indians (and later black slaves).
I encourage anyone who qualifies to participate in the various family societies like the Sons of the American Revolution. They average age may be 75, but they're good people and are a great way to feel more apart of wherever you live.
Oh yes, the German and especially catholic waves of immigrants post 1850 were a terrible idea and many, including my ancestors at the time, repeatedly said so. It's only gotten worse since then.
Palatine German immigration to the USA began around ~1709, it reached its height from the 1720 - 1750.
so not the "German and especially catholic waves of immigrants post 1850"?
They're German but very pre-1850 and heavily / mostly Protestant.
I probably should have phrased that part as "post-1850 German and especially Catholic immigration... ." I didn't mean to include the earlier anabaptists in that sentence.
Yes, also Lutherans and Reformed (Calvinist).
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It was based on both, which was reflected in the first eighty years of immigration acts as passed by the Congress, after being reaffirmed by many founding fathers. The idea is a necessary, not sufficient, condition.
I don't consider African-Americans to be the same as Americans, but they have no where else to go, and I view them as native to the land, despite their distance from the American population. The time to repatriate them to Africa was 150 years ago, and that door has since closed*. They are one of three categories of people native to the continent, which are essentially Americans, African-Americans, and the various tribes (not American and so not Native American, either).
Otherwise, unironically yeschad.jpeg. The only reason I don't use the revolutionary war as the cutoff is because of the 14th amendment, and the hundreds of thousands of Americans who died to settle that dispute, but if your ancestors weren't here on Jan 1 1866, then you're just visiting. Immigrants have the responsibility not just to assimilate through dress and culture and language, but through blood, and so the Irish-American and Italian-American communities you see on the East Coast are also repugnant to my sensibilities.
Gary Locke is my prime example. Ancestors immigrated in the late 19th century, but his Chinese grandmother gave birth to his Chinese father in China, and then that man moved to back to America and served in WWII, but went back to Hong Kong to marry a Chinese woman. He's Chinese, still, and married another Chinese woman (Mona Lee) and made Chinese children.
Being born in a barn does not make a man a horse.
I've always respected the logical consistency of this position, but it is so far outside the realm of possibility that to debate it feels like stepping into some alternate dimension where the platonic forms of nationalism, true communism (tm), and libertarianism exist unmoored from the flesh and blood human beings they are supposed to apply to. How much pre-1866 ancestry is enough? Is someone whose grandparents came through Ellis Island but only identifies as American really less worthy of the title than me, who has colonial ancestry but also an immigrant mother and speaks a foreign language at home? If some immigration officer with a Polish last name comes to deport me one day, can I pull out my SAR badge like an Uno reverse card and send him to Warsaw instead, or would we have to compare blood quanta first? In short order this gets as messy as trying to dole out reparations for slavery would.
For most people, common sense says no, if they observed all aspects of my life they would conclude that I am in fact less American than the third generation Italian, or the Korean adoptee who hasn't been outside the midwest since she was a baby and speaks only English, or even the Indian doctor in the UK who would love nothing more than to become an American and believes it's the greatest country in the world. The fact that there were minutemen with my last name in the New England militias 250 years ago doesn't change that. Now, if both majority pre-Civil War ancestry and belief in the existence of an Amerikaner ethnos defined by said ancestry are necessary to make one a true American, that leaves you with a population of several thousand Twitter shitposters and a lizardman's constant of rednecks. That's not nothing; Australia was created with less, but you aren't winning a civil war against the civic nationalists anytime soon.
We have to start somewhere, and you start by asserting your frame and believing in it.
Yes, actually. Your SAR card is the whole point. After all, the Constitution says that its purpose is to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. That means you, and it doesn't mean Polaski or Tinetti.
The fact that there are so many immigrants that we have so many halfsies is itself the problem, and it's a problem that is solved by shutting the doors, repressing foreign language and culture, and forcing intermarriage. The third generation Italian in America, who has six different people all choosing to inbreed instead of intermingle, is also the problem. Third generation isn't even that old, we could be talking about the grandparents who immigrated in the 1950s or 60s. The Italians are more like five generations, which again, you couldn't have found a few mixed marriages among thirty people?
We're talking in generational terms already. I'm hoping my sons and grandsons think more this way, and act like it, too.
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