Every so often I come back and give Randolph Bourne's "Trans-National America" another read.
America is a unique sociological fabric, and it bespeaks poverty of imagination not to be thrilled at the incalculable potentialities of so novel a union of men. To seek no other goal than the weary old nationalism — belligerent, exclusive, inbreeding, the poison of which we are witnessing now in Europe — is to make patriotism a hollow sham, and to declare that, in spite of our boastings, America must ever be a follower and not a leader of nations.
The essay ran in the July 1916 issue of the Atlantic Monthly. It's interesting in an of itself as a capsule of the cultural anxieties and conflict of early Twentieth Century America. And in how it's aged, e.g. in Bourne's era it was Scandinavian immigrants making up the foreign hordes, it shows what has remained consistent: fear of the other, the new, and, I would suggest, a belief in a weak concept of America.
The South, in fact, while this vast Northern development has gone on, still remains an English colony, stagnant and complacent, having progressed scarcely beyond the early Victorian era. It is culturally sterile because it has had no advantage of cross-fertilization like the Northern states. What has happened in states such as Wisconsin and Minnesota is that strong foreign cultures have struck root in a new and fertile soil. America has meant liberation, and German and Scandinavian political ideas and social energies have expanded to a new potency.
To the extent the immigration concerns of a country like Norway are valid with regard to it's cultural identity, they can at least point to a singular linguisitic and cultural identity (if you ignore the Laplanders, that is). At no point has America been a country of such a singular identity, of language, of culture, of relgion. Our popular culture has often mainained a facade of such, but it has only hidden the real heterogenous nature of America (whether by accident or not). If your concept of America is predicated on strict adherence to Anglo-Saxon traditions and 19th Century cultural values, then the addition of anything new and not immediately and fully assimilated is enough to destroy your America.
Alternatively, if your concept of America is dynamic, that it can absorb new people and borrow from them, reinventing and improving itself along the way on a foundation of shared aspirations, then your strong concept is not at risk from new entrants.
There are economic concerns around immigration, some more valid than others. But the cultural concerns arise from a static concept of America, a fragile concept of an America.
Originally published 2026-01-04