Two hundred fifty years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, fundamentally different from the nations of Europe.
Most of today’s European nations originated as “ethno-states”—countries that belonged to a particular people sharing the same “blood,” typically named after that people. Germany, for example, was the nation belonging to and populated by Germans, but to be German, it was not enough to speak German. You had to be born German. You had to be born to German parents; you had to be German by blood.
In the late 18th century, there were also numerous multiethnic kingdoms and empires, embracing more than one ethno-state. Great Britain was an example. The Spanish and Russian empires were others.
America was none of the above. It was not an empire but a nation; not a kingdom but a democracy—and its people were not defined by blood. From the very beginning, America was a multiethnic, democratic nation.
“What then is the American, this new man?” asked Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur in 1782. “I could point out to you a family whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a French woman, and whose present four sons have now four wives of different nations.” A man might be from any nation, but if he came to our shores he became a citizen, an American. As Crèvecoeur famously added: “Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labors and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world.”
