by Pilgrim's Pride | July 17th, 2012
Of all the words used to describe the people, land, and sovereign states of North America, none is more widely used and misunderstood than the very adjective itself, “American”.
What is it and what does it mean?
Well, first of all, we examine it as a word in our mother tongue, English. It is an adjective, which usually modifies a noun. The root comes from famed 16th C navigator Americus Vespucius (as he called himself in Latin) so honored by German cartographer Martin Waldseemuller. But you learned all this in high school so we’ll move on to the crux of the matter.
In 1507, America was still a great unknown and seen to be a grand prize for the world powers of the day. Mainly, they desired America for her extractable resources, leading to some of the most unfortunate and needless bloodletting known to history at the hands of the day’s reigning unipower Spain.
However, what truly captured the imagination of the world was the strip of land along the Atlantic coast and the activities of the amazing inhabitants thereof.
Not French North America (Canada).
Not Spanish North America (Mexico).
Not Dutch North America (New Netherlands).
English North America.
(Okay, if you want to get all pedantic it was British North America but no one, not then not now ever said the Americans rebelled and broke from the king of Britain!)
Map of Colonial North America 1763
And here is where history intersects language because the people who lived along that Atlantic coastline were not known as English — although they were Englishmen in the main and all were subject to the king of England — they were known as the American-British or simply the Americans.
So “American” is an adjective that described the (okay!) British subjects up to the 4th day of July, in the Year of Our Lord 1776. It was used colloquially by the entire world and the name stuck. Henceforth, the divers occupants of formerly British North America would be called Americans.
No longer “English” and not “United Statesers”. Not “USAns” nor “USers”
Americans.
It should go without saying — but it does not go without saying — that this is the “new nation” everyone bragged about then and at least until Lincoln called it out in his Gettysburg Address of 1863.
The Americans were a nation. A new people. A new race.*
And also a very, very old race because their main rootstock came from the British Isles and those people were a people for perhaps 9,000 years (e.g., Adrian Targett.)
Britain in the midst of the English Conquest
“But what about the Dutch and the French and the Scotsmen and the Portuguese and everyone else that wasn’t English?”
They were called Americans, too, and were the inspiration for “e pluribus unum” as they tended to live among their own in their own favored colonies. Thus we had Anglo-Saxon New England and Pennsylvania allying with Britonnic Virginia and her sisters in the South. Stout German Protestants making common cause with French Protestants (the aristocratic Huguenots and their people) fighting shoulder to shoulder with Dutch aristocrats and their indentured servants in New York.
All would be called “American”.
Religious Migration from Western Europe
The Races of 18th Century America
Their children and grandchildren for all time are the posterity boldly proclaimed in the famous Preamble to the Constitution of the United States. After all, a man will do anything even die for his children. I don’t know a one who would die for money or an alien stranger as a matter of principle.
In other words, the Americans of 1776 undertook rebellion and treason against their king, sometimes pitting father against son as with Benjamin Franklin and members of this writer’s own Revolutionary family. And they did it such that their children and their children’s’ children might have a better life than they.
It was only natural that the Old World’s inhabitants were attracted to the new nation-state “America” (not Canada, not Mexico) in their millions. On arrival, in exchange for a promise of good behaviour, the alien immigrants were permitted to use the national name for themselves and they wasted no time in the renaming. And why not? It was the hottest ticket in town!
Unfortunately, this set a precedent that proved disastrous for the posterity of 1776. Along the way, especially thanks to the 14th Amendment, noxious despite its good intentions, membership in the American nation became confused with the legal technicality of United States citizenship — after all, all Americans were citizens of the United States and the confusion did not harm and in fact reinforced the fusion of nation, state and country into a cohesive, unified America e pluribus unum.
Whoever might have guessed, that a few short years after the War Between the States slaughtered the grandsons of the Revolution by the hundreds of thousands, maiming ten times as many, sometimes ending family lines that had survived tens of thousands of years, those that “did not die in vain” and their children never born, would be replaced en mass by millions upon millions of foreigners and outright aliens, all of whom clamouring to call themselves “American” yet refusing to relinquish their Old Country ties and, to this very day, identify themselves with a hyphenated second adjective to modify “American”?
(No apology for my James Fenimore Cooper inspired sentence construction. Long, complex sentences were normative in the time before sound bites and bumper stickers.)
European Immigration to the U.S. 1851-1860
European Immigration to U.S. 1891-1900
Great Wave Immigration to US 1901-1910
One wonders if such people ever desired to become American … or if they had other more practical motives that dominate their agenda a century later.
The Know-Nothing Flag, “Native Americans, beware of foreign influence” (1854).
We shall discuss this phenomenon in a future essay.
Until then I am sincerely yours,
The Pilgrim’s Pride
Post-script: Yes yes yes it is possible and common for a foreigner to so completely desire to be American that he in fact becomes American. Such immigrants forsake the Old Country and never speak of it again. No hyphen dare traverse their lips and, so far as all the world knows, William Brewster minister of the Mayflower expedition and George Washington, Father of His Country were their blood fathers too.
The others, those celebrated as Lazarus’s macabre “Huddled Masses and Wretched Refuse” would have been met with armed force had they attempted entry to America a scant few decades before. Such as these may and sadly are “United States citizens” but they are not and never shall be Americans.
Number of Immigrants to the U.S. per Decade: 1820-1990
* recall that “race” meant then what “ethnicity” means today. Even in the 20th C “race” meant a specific people related by blood, with a common history and a common future. Winston Churchill, an Anglo-American by parentage, spoke of “the nation and the race dwelling a round the globe” in his famous Lionheart speech some years after the end of of the second World War. The vulgar use of race to mean skin color came about shortly afterward, according to the use in the US south. Most unfortunate, don’t you think?
A good discussion of early Republican citizenship practices: Responses to Immigration – Reform and Restriction
You may not have noticed, but most of your uses of American in your essay are nouns, not adjectives. Inhabitants (noun) of the United States (noun), commonly called America (noun), are called Americans (noun). Remember: a noun names a person, place, or thing. Adjectives modify nouns. You can thank me later.
I share your dismay with many who immigrate to the United States and live off the country but never really become part of it. Many, many others, though, do become Americans, largely forsaking the land from which they came. Some of them may even use a hyphenated form to indicate their origins and family connections.
Yes, quite. Words often take on multiple functions in a language, especially borrow words and words that undergo semantic shift.
In the case of “American”, originally used as an adjective, it became a noun pressed into service sometime in the 18th C., the result of a kind of dual-clipping of the object, the deep meaning retained implicitly, something along the lines of “Those crazy (British) American(s) (colonists), breaking from their king like this. I say!”
It is this sense of the word that captured the world’s imagination. More specifically, it was the American (colonists) of New England: there was nothing about say, Virginia and the southern colonies, that wasn’t commonplace throughout history. It was the antics of the New England (British) American(s) stood out and commanded global attention.
Your point about inhabitants of the U.S. being called American is another all-too-common misnomer. This stems from the 18th C. identity of American (British) and U.S. persons, thanks to the uniqueness of the political revolution of 1776.
On examination, we see that it is much more than mere geolocational nomenclature. There are other peoples in America that are not called by the name, namely Canadians and Mexicans. So American is restricted to the “Free and Independent States” of British North America. Thanks to the war, residual North American British, and displaced Loyalists, were forced to call themselves Canadian, even though Canada was the French name for French North America.
So by actual popular usage, American ceased to be an adjective except in narrow technical ways. It was, after 1776, the name of the English Rebels and their land, those 13 former English colonies in North America.
After Independence, newcomers to “America”, which was not yet called “U.S.” as we understand the term today, fancied themselves Americans. And why not? It was a prestigious affiliation and, since early immigration was almost exclusively similar to pre-Revolutionary ethnicity, as a practical matter it didn’t matter.
It was only later, in the late 19th and early 20th C. that confusion over the use of the word manifested itself. The Great Wave immigrants had almost nothing in common with the Americans themselves, apart from the shared biospace. Yet, because Americans were U.S. citizens at that point, after the 14th Amendment and the Civil War that generated it, the national identify was the civil identity. It was only natural that immigrants, come here to avail themselves of American bounty and American opportunity would “jump on the bandwagon” and call themselves “American” too.
But this self-appellation was tolerated only in breach. This is proved by their own use of American in its original adjective sense in examples such as “Italian-American”, “German-American”, “Irish-American” and on and on and on.
Those immigrants were full aware they were not really Americans (noun) but were in fact transplanted “Hyphenates” of their Old Countries.
Then we got ourselves in much trouble with self-deceiving lies about “assimilation” and the rubber-stamping of immigrant’s status during WWII service, with FDR standing as their putative American Emperor.
The American nation never recovered from the Great Wave. Those immigrants, in a bizarre manifestation of White Guilt, did much damage with non-European immigration, chain migration, dilution via court battle of the American Protestant religion, and now we see their policy preferences (e.g., alcohol and gun control) starkly at odds with traditional American ethical standards.
Anyway, that is why this site exists — to reclaim the Glory of American as a title of honor, for an identifiable people whose crowning achievement was the American Republic. It is also our hope that this reclamation will help undo some of the damage we endured while under the intoxicating spell of the lie of alien assimilation. I am reminded of our cousin William who said that a rose, by any other name, would smell as sweet. Applied to the Hyphenates, this remains true today as they busy themselves reconstructing our beloved America into some wierd version of their eurofief homelands.
Thanks for the soap box opportunity — and please to comment as you are moved!
Pilgrim’s Pride