Arizona republican., 1916-06-01


 When ne left the club house to take he was to deliver the principal speech of the day, a tremendous crowd greet ed him. The crowd called for speech.
 Col. Roosevelt stood on the seat of the automobile and said: q am sorry that circumstances were such that I could not address the people of St. Louis in a large hall. l have just one thing to say, l am here to talk straight United States 1"
 The address of Colonel Roosevelt at the City club follows in full:
 Here in St. Louis I wish to speak briefly on the subject of Americanism. 1 stand for straight Americanism un- conditioned and unqualified, and I | stand against every form of hyphen- ated Americanism. I do not speak of | the hyphen when it is employed as a | mere matter of inconvenience, although | personally I like to avoid it's use even in such manner. 1 speak of and con- | demn it's use whenever it represents an | effort to form political parties along | racial lines or to bring pressure to bear | on parties and politicians, not for | American purposes, but in the interest of some group of voters of a certain national origin, or of the country from which they or their fathers came.
 Americanism is not a matter of creed, birthplace or national descent, but, of the soul and of the spirit. If the American has the right stuff in I of fingers whether he is Jew or Gentle, Catholic or Protestant. l care not snap of my fingers whether his ancestors came over in the Mayflower, or whether he was born, or his parents were born, in Germany Ireland, France, England, Scandinavia Russia or Italy or any other country. All I ask of the immi grant is that he shall be physically and intellectually fit, of sound character, and eager in good faith to become an American citizen. If the immigrant is of the right kind I am for him, and if the native American is of the wrong kind 1 am against him. But unless the immigrant becomes in good faith an American and nothing else, then he is out of place in this country and the sooner he leaves it the better.
 We in this country form a new na- tion. akin to, but different from each of the nations of Europe. AS Alexan- der Hamilton put it, Let us be neither Greeks nor Trojans, but Americans" We are false to this country if we rank ourselves as German Americans" or English Americans" "Irish-Ameri- cans" or French Americans" Our duty is to the United States. This duty should constrain us in the first place to treat the other nations primarily according to the way such treatment serves American interests; and in the second place so far as possible to treat [ other nations in such manner as serves | the interests of mankind at large. Every nation acts sometimes well and sometimes ill Therefore we should stand for or against any nation ac- cordingly as it's behavior tells for good or for evil in the particular crisis with which we have actually to deal. We should be friendly to all nations, and in any crisis we should judge each nation by its conduct in that crisis. We should condemn the misconduct of any nation, we should oppose its encroach- ments upon our rights with equal vigor, whether it be Germany, England, France, Russia or any other power, ac- cording to what it actually does on the given occasion with which we have to deal.
 So much for our treatment of other nations. Now for our own citizens. We represent many different race strains. Our ancestors came from many different Old World nationalities. It will spell ruin to this nation if these nationalities remain separated from one another instead of being assimilated to the new and larger American life.
 The children and children's children of all of us have to live here in this land together. Our children's children will intermarry, one with another, your children's children, friends, and mine. They will be the citizens of one coun' try. Even if they wished, they could not remain citizens of foreign coun- tries. The attempt to keep them with a half citizenship, with divided loy- alty, split between devotion to the land in which they were born and in which their children are to dwell, and the land from which their fathers came, will merely mean that they fail to re- main citizens of the old world land and yet do not get the benefit of being citizens of the world land. The effort to keep our citizenship divided against itself by the use of the hyphen and along the lines of national origin is certain to breed spirit of bitterness and prejudice and dislike between great bodies of our citizens. If some citizens band together as German Americans or Irish Americans, then after a while others are certain to band together as English Americans or as Scandinavian Americans and every such banding together, every attempt to make for political purposes Ger man. American alliance or an Irish American alliance or an English American alliance or a Scandinavian American alliance means down at bot tom an effort against the interest of straight-out American citizenship, an effort to bring into our nation the bit ter old world rivalries and jealousies and hatreds. What 1 have been striv- ing for year and three quarters to do is to protest against the growth of this utterly unAmerican spirit, to pro- test against the upgrowth of a spirit which means, if successful, division and impotence in our national life, the breaking up of our unity as nation, the severance of our citizenship along the bitter lines of old world antipathy. We cannot afford to have our children