Trans-National America
Randolph Bourne
We are all
foreign-born or the descendants of foreign-born, and if distinctions are to be
made between us they should rightly be on some other ground than
indigenousness. The early colonists came over with motives no less colonial
than the later. They did not come to be assimilated in an American melting-pot.
They did not come to adopt the culture of the American Indian. They had not the
smallest intention of "giving themselves without reservation" to the
new country. They came to get freedom to live as they wanted. They came to
escape from the stifling air and chaos of the old world; they came to make
their fortune in a new land. They invented no new social framework. Rather they
brought over bodily the old ways to which they had been accustomed. Tightly
concentrated on a hostile frontier, they were conservative beyond belief. Their
pioneer daring was reserved for the objective conquest of material resources.
In their folkways, in their social and political institutions, they were, like
every colonial people, slavishly imitative of the mother-country. So that, in
spite of the "Revolution," our whole legal and political system
remained more English than the English, petrified and unchanging, while in
England law developed to meet the needs of the changing times.
In this passage, the
essayist, Mr. Randolph Bourne, takes
issue with the idea of the "melting-pot." He writes that the early colonists did not
come to America with the intention to assimilate and or adopt the culture of
the American Indian but rather to create their own. However, they did not create a new culture or
social framework. Instead, they
continued to hold on to the ways of the old world.
I chose this passage
because of how Mr. Bourne refers to all Americans as foreign born or
descendant's of foreign born parents.
The thought of stripping one of their culture in the name of
assimilation didn’t sit well with me and
it struck a chord with me.