Overleg:Richard Nixon

message: Apologies for writing in English. I came across this article by mistake, but there is a BIG mistake here. Richard Nixon's ancestors were NOT Greek!!!! He was Irish on his father's side and German (Milhous/Mülhausen) on the mother's.
replies: text: Do you have a source for that? I need a sourche before i can change it! SidewinderXP2 Talk to me! 11 jan 2007 08:15 (CET)

message: Here is a link to the Richard Nixon library and birthplace in Yorba Linda, California. 
http://www.nixonfoundation.org/index.php?src=gendocs&link=FunFacts&category=Home
Although it does not specifically state Nixon's ancestry, you can see the names of his grandparents, and they aren't Greek. The English-language wiki also gives pertinent information, though of course that isn't authoritative. Any of the numerous book-biographies of Nixon will confirm that his ancestry was Irish Catholic (converted to Quaker) on the father's side, Quaker-German on the mother's. Reputable biographies include ones written by Roger Morris, Bela Kornitzer, Earl Mazo, and so forth. Where did you (or the author here) get the idea that Nixon's ancestry was Greek? Except for John Kennedy, who was Irish Catholic, every single American president has been Protestant and of English descent (Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe. . .Harrison, Tyler, Taylor, Pierce, Buchanan, Lincoln, Johnson. . .Garfield, Arthur, Harrison again, Cleveland. . .Taft, Wilson, Truman, Johnson, Ford, Carter, Reagan (like Nixon, was partly Irish but raised Protestant), Bush I & II, and Clinton;  Dutch (Roosevelts, Martin van Buren) and perhaps some French Hugenot or Scandinavian origin. [Note again, Protestant.]  Only two (Herbert Hoover and Dwight Eisenhower) were of German or Swiss-German origin.  As an American who has studied American history for decades I can tell you without equivocation that the US has never elected a president with Greek, Italian, Eastern European or any other ethnic roots. In fact, this very topic raged in the media back in 1988, when the Democratic Party fielded Michael Dukakis for President. He would have been the first "ethnic" (i.e., non-northern European) president and many felt that this factor contributed to his losing the election. Again, I don't see how anyone could have gotten the idea that Nixon was Greek. I would have assumed that you folks in Holland would be far too well informed  to make such a blatant error! (Then again, while living in Germany I discovered that 75% of the population thinks that the US has 52 states instead of 50; yet I am 100% American and know full well that Germany has 16, and the chancellors of the postwar period have included Adenauer, Erhard, Willy Brandt, Helmut Schmidt, Helmut Kohl, Gerhard Schroeder and Angela Merkel.) Among other things, Nixon did not, as do Mike Dukakis and virtually all Greeks, belong to the Greek Orthodox Church, but rather to the Society of Friends, i.e., the Quakers--and the religion factor played a crucial role in his life. This fact is widely known.
Again, please forgive me for using English on the Dutch site, but, well, you asked! (Ich hätte auf Deutsch antworten können, aber das ist wahrscheinlich nicht genau salonsfähig.)
Hello anonimo,
You are blatantly wrong with the above statements. Please realise that Europeans have a very varied ancestry spanning many European countries and when reading pedigrees you often will end up in many different countries. Also - writing in German would not be understood by some people here since this is another language.  14 jan 2007 09:55 (CET)
Apologies for the German. But I am not wrong. Why are you all being so stubborn? Richard Nixon will always remain a highly controversial figure, but the data concerning his origins are undisputed and common knowledge among historians. Now, it is certainly true that nobody in Europe or North America is of "pure" racial or ethnic origin; I never said or intimated any such thing. It is quite possible that if one traced Nixon's ancestry back far enough, one would find people who had migrated to Ireland or Germany from elsewhere. For example, many Irish have Spanish blood from the time of the Armada (the "black Irish"), but that does not make them ethnically Spanish. Nixon may well have had ultimate origins outside of Germany and Ireland, but his immediate forefathers were not Greek immigrants, period. As for the rest of the American Presidents, the same principle applies: they have all (with the noted exceptions) come from Northwestern European stock. The fact that some of their English or German ancestors might have originally migrated from elsewhere a millenium ago does not controvert the hard fact that nobody of other ethnic origins has been elected president. In other words, for purposes of historical and cultural analysis, by asserting that American presidents have in fact had non-northern European ethnicity, you are using the term so broadly as to render it operationally meaningless. To put it yet another way: we know today that the human race originated in Africa, but that does not transmute present-day Russians, Italians, Germans, or Chinese into "Africans."
Hello anonimo,
The greek part may be wrong but Nixon was not solely from "Northwestern European stock" as you seem to want to portray him. I will remove the greek sentence from the article but find below his pedigree as far as I could trace it. It shows English/Scottish, German and Polish ancestry from his fathers side. His mother I could not trace yet.
         /Melvin Carl Kulpinski
      /Samuel Brady Nixon (1847-1914)
      /   \Lorraine Edler
   /Francis Anthony Nixon (3 Dec 1878 Elk Township, Vinton, Ohio - 4 Sep 1956 La Habra, Los Angeles)
   /  \   /Thomas Wiley Wadwworth (1826-1879)
   /  \Sarah Ann Wadsworth (1952-1886)
   /      \Mary Louise Moore (1832-1918
Richard Milhaus Nixon (9 Jan 1913 Yorba Linda, California -  22 Apr 1994 Yorba Linda, California)
   \Hannah Milhous (7 Mar 1885 Butlerville, Jennings, Indiana -  30 Sep 1967 Whittier, Los Angeles)
 16 jan 2007 18:07 (CET)
Found it:
The pedigree of Nixon's mother (albeit not complete) can be found at []
 16 jan 2007 18:43 (CET)
Ah, four of the sweetest but most annoying words in the English language, "I told you so." :-) Forgive my pedantry. Nixon's mother, Hannah Milhouse, came from a German family whose name had originally been Milhausen, and I believe they originally came from the region of Alsace-Lorraine (Elsaß-Lotharingen, depending on one's vantage point), specifically the city known as "Mülhausen" in German and "Mulhouse" in French. * * * Whatever Nixon's ancestors ultimately stemmed from, culturally he was Irish and German, and he referred to this from time to time in his writing and correspondence.  Coincidentally, Pat Nixon (née Patricia Ryan) was also Irish on the father's side, German on the mother's. (Nixon alluded to this in his famous (or infamous) "Checkers" or "Fund" speech in 1952.) 
If I make a further comment, it seems to me that our disagreement arises, in part, from the general refusal of many Europeans to take seriously many Americans' interest in our own European heritage. In this country it's quite common to say, for example, "I'm a quarter Irish, half Greek and a quarter Native American." Nobody thinks such a statement unusual or inappropriate. But when I lived in Germany, many people told me that they regarded it as ludicrous--the idea being, I suppose, that if your ancestors had left Germany in 1850, their descendants were no longer German (of course the Nazis had their own ideas on that, so perhaps today's Germans are trying to repudiate the "Volksdeutsche" notion, I don't know). At any rate, in the U.S. most people believe that tracing and defining one's ethnic background in this manner is perfectly consistent with being an American. I grant you, these tracings are by no means exhaustive, but they mean more to many of us than you might assume.
thread_title:  starting point