During the 1990s, there was much hand-wringing in some quarters at the prospect of America’s beautiful mosaic fracturing into an unworkable, divided society. Doomsayers fretted that Americans were no longer identifying themselves as, well, Americans first and foremost.
Critics claimed that identity politics were the culprit in this emerging crisis. That too many people’s allegiances, identities, and agendas were based on their membership in various sub-groups of ethnicity, gender, and/or class. None other than Arthur Schlesinger, an eminent American Historian and former adviser to President John Kennedy, complained that America was suffering from “too much pluribus and not enough unum.” Another term that became popular among critics was “hyphenated Americans,” a jab at those who were supposedly not content to simply be “American.”
Of course identity politics were nothing new to the United States. Indeed, the very term “hyphenated Americans” was first popularized by former President Theodore Roosevelt back in 1915 when he gave a Columbus Day speech in which he derided anyone, whether immigrant or nativist, who did not identify solely as American. “There is no such thing as a hyphenated American who is a good American,” he decreed. “The only man who is a good American is the man who is an American and nothing else.”
The issue girding identity politics in Roosevelt’s time was foreign immigration. Immigrants had been washing over America’s shores by the millions for 35 years when TR gave his speech at a Knights of Columbus meeting in New York City, to an audience comprised mostly of Irish immigrants no less. But identity politics in American history go back much further than that.
Historians, though they don’t necessarily use the term in this context, are keenly aware that Andrew Jackson’s rise to the presidency came as he rode a wave of unprecedented identity politics. Although their candidate was a wealthy land speculator who owned a cotton plantation nearly two square miles in size and over 150 slaves, Jackson’s campaign presented him as an every man. They starkly contrasted him against and even mocked the well-heeled, blue blood elitism of his main rival, John Quincy Adams.