5 - Who is “American”?

Summary

What Antin argued in her autobiography and her lectures constituted in the eyes of some critics an erosion of the word “American.” As that word was increasingly claimed, or “usurped,” by “aliens,” alternative terms were launched such as “100 percent Americans,” “native Americans,” “only Americans,” “real Americans,” or “American-Americans.” Edward Bok asked in his second autobiography, Twice Thirty: Some Short and Simple Annals of the Road (1925): “How many of us, born here or elsewhere, could qualify as a ‘hundred per cent American’? Scarcely one, because, in truth, there is no such American.” Yet both Brander Matthews and Nicholas Roosevelt resorted to the term “American-Americans” when they critically reviewed Horace Kallen’s 1924 book of essays Culture and Democracy in the United States, the book in which Kallen introduced to print the term “cultural pluralism,” Matthews under the worried headline, “Making America a Racial Crazy-Quilt.” The negatively charged image of the quilt which also appeared in satirical cartoons of the cubists at the Armory Show had yet to be reimagined as a positive symbol of America’s happily diverse folk heritage.

Antin’s own story of Americanization served as a litmus test for the meaning of the word “American.” The New Englander Barrett Wendell, who was among the first professors of English to teach American literature at Harvard University, wrote in a letter of 1917 that Antin “has developed an irritating habit of describing herself and her people as Americans, in distinction from such folks as [Wendell’s wife] Edith and me, who have been here for three hundred years.”