America founded and molded by settlers, not immigrants

Wisdom of the week

[Reprinted from Issues & Views September 6, 2004]

Excerpts from Samuel Huntington's provocative book, Who Are We? - The Challenges to America's National Identity (Simon & Schuster):

In its origins America was not a nation of immigrants, it was a society, or societies, of settlers who came to the New World in the 17th and 18th centuries. Its origins as an Anglo-Protestant settler society have, more than anything else, profoundly and lastingly shaped American culture, institutions, historical development, and identity.

Settlers and immigrants differ fundamentally. Settlers leave an existing society, usually in a group, in order to create a new community, a city on a hill, in a new and often distant territory. They are imbued with a sense of collective purpose. Implicitly or explicitly they subscribe to a compact or charter that defines the basis of the community they create and their collective relation to their mother country. Immigrants, in contrast, do not create a new society. They move from one society to a different society. Migration is usually a personal process, involving individuals and families, who individually define their relation to their old and new countries. The 17th and 18th century settlers came to America because it was a tabula rasa. Apart from Indian tribes, which could be killed off or pushed westward, no society was there; and they came in order to create societies that embodied and would reinforce the culture and values they brought with them from their origin country.

Immigrants came later because they wanted to become part of the society the settlers had created. Unlike settlers, they experienced "culture shock" as they and their offspring attempted to absorb a culture often much at odds with that which they brought with them. Before immigrants could come to American, settlers had to found America.

Americans commonly refer to those who produced independence and the Constitution in the 1770s and 1780s as the Founding Fathers. Before there could be Founding Fathers, however, there were founding settlers. America did not begin in 1775, 1776, or 1787. It began with the first settler communities of 1607, 1620, and 1630. What happened in the 1770s and 1780s was rooted in and a product of the Anglo-American Protestant society and culture that had developed over the intervening one and a half centuries.

The distinction between settlers and immigrants was well recognized by those who led America to independence. Before the Revolution, as John Higham has observed, English and Dutch colonists "conceived of themselves as founders, settlers, or plants -- the formative population of those colonial societies -- not as immigrants. Theirs was the polity, the language, the pattern of work and settlement, and many of the mental habits to which the immigrants would have to adjust." The term "immigrant" came into the English language in the America of the 1780s to distinguish current arrivals from the founding settlers.

America's core culture has been and, at the moment, is still primarily the culture of the 17th and 18th century settlers who founded American society. The central elements of that culture can be defined in a variety of ways but include the Christian religion, Protestant values and moralism, a work ethic, the English language, British traditions of law, justice, and the limits of government power, and a legacy of European art, literature, philosophy, and music. Out of this culture the settlers developed in the 18th and 19th centuries the American Creed with its principles of liberty, equality, individualism, representative government, and private property.

Subsequent generations of immigrants were assimilated into the culture of the founding settlers and contributed to and modified it. But they did not change it fundamentally. This is because, at least until the late 20th century, it was Anglo-Protestant culture and the political liberties and economic opportunities it produced that attracted them to America. . . .

Excluding blacks, America was a highly homogeneous society in terms of race, national origin, and religion. "Providence has been pleased," John Jay observed in The Federalist, "to give this one connected country to one united people -- a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established liberty and independence." . . .

Large-scale immigration has been an intermittent feature of American life. Immigration did not become significant in absolute and relative terms until the 1830s, declined in the 1850s, increased dramatically in the 1880s, declined in the 1890s, became very high in the decade and a half before World War I, declined drastically after passage of the 1924 immigration act, and stayed low until the 1965 immigration act generated a massive new wave.

Over the years, immigrants have played a central and, in some respects, more than proportionate role in American development. Between 1820 and 2000, however, the foreign-born averaged only slightly over 10 percent of the American population. To describe America as a "nation of immigrants" is to stretch a partial truth into a misleading falsehood, and to ignore the central fact of America's beginning as a society of settlers.

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