Now turn this around: who does belong? Who is allowed to be American? Although it is a nation that puts an immigrant narrative at its core—a story that immediately shunted aside the history of black and Native American people—many of the groups who came to the United States in significant numbers have faced some sort of prejudice. Benjamin Franklin, for instance, was wary of the Germans, asking, “Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanise us?” However, in the earliest days of nationhood—itself a political experiment—the United States needed to craft an identity.
In some ways this was a reaction to Europe of the 17th and 18th centuries, which was a kaleidoscope of often warring kingdoms, city-states, and principalities. For the fledgling United States, identity was also an existential question. Survival apart from the British empire depended on some sort of unity, not least because the strip of 13 colonies along the Atlantic was surrounded by Native American nations and the encroaching Spanish and French. In formulating what the United States would be, one founder, John Jay, had this vision of the nation: “Providence has been pleased to give this one country to one united people, a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion.”
Like whiteness, being “American” was designed at some level to be exclusionary; it was built on Anglo and northern European ancestry, Protestantism, and, for the most part, speaking English. There was no place for the Indians or the enslaved Africans, or even southern Europeans. To J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur, a French immigrant who arrived in 1759 and was writing around the time of the American Revolution, “Americans” were “a mixture of English, Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans, and Swedes.” Crèvecœur, whose Letters from an American Farmer enjoyed a wide readership in Europe, considered these people to be “melted into a new race of men, whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world.”