The United States As a Nation

Today, the United States proudly celebrates the 235th anniversary of its independence. According to Alexis de Tocqueville in his classical work “Democracy in America,” “the development of the United States offers the only opportunity to see, in the light of history, the birth and development of a national society.”*

Of the three fundamentals over which the American nationality rests, the historical roots of the English tradition of liberty that colonizers brought from the other side of the Atlantic represents the first in importance and sequence. Second, indispensable to the formation of a separate American nation, was the immense and not very crowded continent that was inviting for Anglo-Americans to seek independence and territorial expansion, at the same time as it was providing the opportunity for pioneer innovation, a federal solution for a republic of many republics. Finally, historical roots and special opportunities merged in the idea of universal liberty with American power to take in the millions of immigrants that reached the country in order to fill open spaces and reach the apparently limited potentialities of the American land and its inventive techniques.

The character of the United States as a land with open doors (“a nation of many nations”) became as important to American nationalism as its identification with the idea of individual liberty and its federal character. Thomas Jefferson, who during his youth had been opposed to immigration, wanted in 1817 to keep America’s doors open, “to establish a sanctuary for those who have been compelled by the injustices of Europe to seek out happiness in other climates. This refuge, once known, will produce reactions on those who stay behind when warning their master that when the evils of the Egyptian oppression are larger than those of the abandonment of the country, another Canaan is open, and there its subjects will be received like brothers and protected against the oppression as they are able to enjoy the right to govern themselves.”*

Decades later, when immigration began to rise, Ralph Waldo Emerson went further than Jefferson. He thought that “the capital advantage of our Republic resided in that through the organic hospitality of its institutions it was attracting to its territory the health and strengths of all the nations and was promising, thorough a perpetual alliance, to reedit the most vigorous qualities and realizations.”* For Emerson, America was synonymous with opportunity, a concept shared by many immigrants.

*Editor’s Note: These quotations, though accurately translated, could not be verified.