WERNER SOLLORS

"Yes, the Statue of Liberty still stands, and we still open our arms under
our law to people that are politically oppressed," [President] Bush said.
But he added: "I will not, because I've sworn to uphold the Constitution,
open the doors to economic refugees all over the world. We can't do that."
The crowd applauded.

-- New York Times, May 22, 1992

Ethnic and national identities are interrelated in ways that are important for
an analysis of "minority" as well as "majority" cultures. For this reason the
historical nature of categories such as "American" deserves close scrutiny in
investigations of immigrant, ethnic, racial, and other cultural issues. This
relationship could be looked at from many vantage points. I have here chosen
to focus on the ways in which "America" and its national symbols have been
defined, debated, and redefined in their relationship to ethnic diversity.

It is well known that modern geographers named the New World " Amer-
ica," honoring the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci. Initially the term
"American" referred to the original inhabitants, or Indians; in Puritan New
England, however, it was increasingly adopted to refer to the British colonists,
as when Nathaniel Ward, in 1647, spoke of an "American Creed"--and
meant the religious beliefs of the English settlers in North America. In the
American Revolution the term was used to emphasize less the British origin
than the new makeup of the settler population of the United States. In Crèe-
cocur's famous answer to the question "What is an American?" in the third of
his Letters from an American Farmer ( 1782) he singled out "that strange

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