Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Anyone can become American by creed
Belonging by principle
At its most open-hearted, the country has worked that way for most of its history. If you subscribe to the principles, you're in. In 1976 it felt that way to children and grandchildren of immigrants whose fathers worked on the waterfront: 1776 was as much theirs as anybody else's, with no question about belonging. Nobody was talking about three percenters or heritage Americans.
Nativism and Puritanism
Two other threads run through American history and push the opposite direction. Nativism has given people a way to sort who is inside from who is outside. A Puritan streak, tied to religious sensibilities and separate from the Calvinists who arrived in Massachusetts Bay beginning in 1630, offers another way to say certain people are in and others are out.
Newcomers keep arriving
Immigrants keep arriving with the same idea. In the 18th century they came from Germany, Northern Europe, Ireland, and Scotch-Irish country, and later from Ireland during the famine, Italy, East Asia, and West and East Africa. They come believing there is room for them, and few places anywhere have that kind of pull.
Why call America a nation built on ideas?
G. K. Chesterton, an English writer who toured the United States, described America in 1922 as a nation with the soul of a church, founded on a creed. Lincoln made a similar claim at Gettysburg in 1863 when he said the country was dedicated to a proposition. That idea carried no ethnic test, which set the United States apart from nations defined by ancestry. The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, wrote birthright citizenship into the Constitution.
How did nativism shape American politics?
In the 1850s the American Party, nicknamed the Know-Nothings, won seats in Congress and state governments on an anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant platform. Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, the first federal law to bar immigration based on nationality. The Immigration Act of 1924 set national origins quotas that favored northern and western Europeans. Congress replaced the quota system with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.
How did Puritan ideas shape American belonging?
Puritans in Massachusetts Bay limited voting to church members, which tied civic standing to religious belief. John Winthrop led the 1630 migration, and in a sermon associated with that voyage he described the colony as a city upon a hill. The phrase later became a staple of American political speech. John F. Kennedy used it in a January 1961 speech before taking office.
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