Noted historian Gordon Wood explains the value of America’s unique circumstances as a nation.
There has been some talk recently that we aren’t and shouldn’t be a creedal nation—that beliefs in a creed are too permissive, too weak a basis for citizenship and that we need to realize that citizens with ancestors who go back several generations have a stronger stake in the country than more-recent immigrants.
I reject this position as passionately as I can. We have seen these blood-and-soil efforts before. In the 1890s, we also had a crisis over immigration. Some Americans tried to claim that because they had ancestors who fought in the Revolution or came here on the Mayflower, they were more American than the recent immigrants.
My wife and I have recently gotten to know a couple who came from Romania in the 1970s and became American citizens in 1980. Although they speak with a slight accent, I believe with all my heart that they are as American as someone whose ancestors came on the Mayflower. That is the beauty of America.
The United States isn’t a nation like other nations, and it never has been. There is no American ethnicity to back up the state, and there was no such distinctive ethnicity even in 1776, when the U.S. was created. Many European countries—Germany, for example—were nations before they became states. Most European states were created out of a prior sense of a common ethnicity or language. Some of them, like the Czech Republic, were created in the 20th century and are newer than the 249-year-old U.S. Yet all are undergirded by peoples that had a pre-existing sense of their own distinctiveness, their own nationhood. In the U.S. the process was reversed. Americans created a state before they were a nation, and much of American history has been an effort to define that nationhood.
America’s lack of a national identity and a common ethnicity may turn out to be an advantage in the 21st century, dominated as it is by mass migrations from the south to the north. It certainly enables the U.S. to be more capable of accepting and absorbing immigrants. The whole world is already in the U.S.
