Not A Nation of Immigrants
“We are a nation of pioneers….We have but little room for the timid, the irresolute, and the idle.” -Theodore Roosevelt America used to see itself as a nation of pioneers. We need to start seeing ourselves that way again.
A Nation of Pioneers
The rhetorical claim that America is a “nation of immigrants” is so common that it is taken for granted. This propagandistic notion is beaten into our heads from childhood. But is this how the American nation traditionally saw itself? I’ll look at quantitative data from Google engrams in a subsequent post. Here, we look something more qualitative: a speech from Theodore Roosevelt at the Minnesota State Fair on September 2, 1901. Roosevelt gave this speech less than two weeks before…