It's kind of long, but is pertinent especially today.


T.R. was the greatest president of modern times.  

He deservedly has his mug on Mt. Rushmore for a good reason--one of many is
listed below--TR's writings on "Hyphenated Americanism"

Theodore Roosevelt Advocates Americanism, 1915


... There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. When I refer to
hyphenated Americans, I do not refer to naturalized Americans. Some of the very
best Americans I have ever known were naturalized Americans, Americans born
abroad. But a hyphenated American is not an American at all. This is just as
true of the man who puts "native" before the hyphen as of the man who puts
German or Irish or English or French before the hyphen. Americanism is a matter
of the spirit and of the soul. Our allegiance must be purely to the United
States. We must unsparingly condemn any man who holds any other allegiance. But
if he is heartily and singly loyal to this Republic, then no matter where he was
born, he is just as good an American as any one else.

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, an intricate knot of
German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans,
Scandinavian-Americans or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate
nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that
nationality, than with the other citizens of the American Republic. 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. The man who calls himself an
American citizen and who yet shows by his actions that he is primarily the
citizen of a foreign land, plays a thoroughly mischievous part in the life of
our body politic. 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. There is no such thing as a hyphenated American who is a good
American. The only man who is a good American is the man who is an American and
nothing else.

For an American citizen to vote as a German-American, an Irish-American, or an
English-American, is to be a traitor to American institutions; and those
hyphenated Americans who terrorize American politicians by threats of the
foreign vote are engaged in treason to the American Republic.

Americanization

The foreign-born population of this country must be an Americanized population -
no other kind can fight the battles of America either in war or peace. It must
talk the language of its native-born fellow-citizens, it must possess American
citizenship and American ideals. It must stand firm by its oath of allegiance in
word and deed and must show that in very fact it has renounced allegiance to
every prince, potentate, or foreign government. It must be maintained on an
American standard of living so as to prevent labor disturbances in important
plants and at critical times. None of these objects can be secured as long as we
have immigrant colonies, ghettos, and immigrant sections, and above all they
cannot be assured so long as we consider the immigrant only as an industrial
asset. The immigrant must not be allowed to drift or to be put at the mercy of
the exploiter. Our object is to not to imitate one of the older racial types,
but to maintain a new American type and then to secure loyalty to this type. We
cannot secure such loyalty unless we make this a country where men shall feel
that they have justice and also where they shall feel that they are required to
perform the duties imposed upon them. The policy of "Let alone" which we have
hitherto pursued is thoroughly vicious from two stand-points. By this policy we
have permitted the immigrants, and too often the native-born laborers as well,
to suffer injustice. Moreover, by this policy we have failed to impress upon the
immigrant and upon the native-born as well that they are expected to do justice
as well as to receive justice, that they are expected to be heartily and
actively and single-mindedly loyal to the flag no less than to benefit by living
under it.

We cannot afford to continue to use hundreds of thousands of immigrants merely
as industrial assets while they remain social outcasts and menaces any more than
fifty years ago we could afford to keep the black man merely as an industrial
asset and not as a human being. We cannot afford to build a big industrial plant
and herd men and women about it without care for their welfare. We cannot afford
to permit squalid overcrowding or the kind of living system which makes
impossible the decencies and necessities of life. We cannot afford the low wage
rates and the merely seasonal industries which mean the sacrifice of both
individual and family life and morals to the industrial machinery. We cannot
afford to leave American mines, munitions plants, and general resources in the
hands of alien workmen, alien to America and even likely to be made hostile to
America by machinations such as have recently been provided in the case of the
two foreign embassies in Washington. We cannot afford to run the risk of having
in time of war men working on our railways or working in our munition plants who
would in the name of duty to their own foreign countries bring destruction to
us. Recent events have shown us that incitements to sabotage and strikes are in
the view of at least two of the great foreign powers of Europe within their
definition of neutral practices. What would be done to us in the name of war if
these things are done to us in the name of neutrality?

One America

All of us, no matter from what land our parents came, no matter in what way we
may severally worship our Creator, must stand shoulder to shoulder in a united
America for the elimination of race and religious prejudice. We must stand for a
reign of equal justice to both big and small. We must insist on the maintenance
of the American standard of living. We must stand for an adequate national
control which shall secure a better training of our young men in time of peace,
both for the work of peace and for the work of war. We must direct every
national resource, material and spiritual, to the task not of shirking
difficulties, but of training our people to overcome difficulties. Our aim must
be, not to make life easy and soft, not to soften soul and body, but to fit us
in virile fashion to do a great work for all mankind. This great work can only
be done by a mighty democracy, with these qualities of soul, guided by those
qualities of mind, which will both make it refuse to do injustice to any other
nation, and also enable it to hold its own against aggression by any other
nation. In our relations with the outside world, we must abhor wrongdoing, and
disdain to commit it, and we must no less disdain the baseness of spirit which
lamely submits to wrongdoing. Finally and most important of all, we must strive
for the establishment within our own borders of that stern and lofty standard of
personal and public neutrality which shall guarantee to each man his rights, and
which shall insist in return upon the full performance by each man of his duties
both to his neighbor and to the great nation whose flag must symbolize in the
future as it has symbolized in the past the highest hopes of all mankind.

Teddy Roosevelt was cast aside by the corrupt Republican Party cronyism of his day and subsequently lost as a third-party candidate.

He'd meet the same fate today for the same reason.

Tag.