Last week I began the reading of my remarks to 131 New Americans who took the oath of citizenship from Magistrate Judge Alice Senechal, at the Sanctuary Events Center, on 12 December 2018. Today I resume those remarks, hearkening back to homesteading days of the nineteenth century and reflecting on what it means to be an American.
Now, this idea of fitting into the new country, adapting to and joining into life in the new land. The immigrants of the past had an advantage presented to them by the United States government. That advantage was conferred by the Homestead Act of 1862, which awarded a homestead, a farm, 160 acres of land, to anyone willing to meet the requirements. The homesteader had to meet the letter of the law of the United States--live on the land and farm it. Homesteads were awarded to native-born Americans and the newly arrived immigrants alike.
New Americans could receive farms from the United States government. The only thing different for them, in addition to the requirements for native-born Americans, was that they had to declare their intention to become American citizens and swear an oath quite similar to the one you are swearing today. I have seen many of these signed oaths in the historical records, the homestead files of immigrants kept today by our National Archives.
How was this possible--for immigrants, who in their hearts still mourned for the old country, to renounce all loyalties to their native lands and declare themselves Americans? There are two reasons this was possible.
First, they did it for their children. The original generation of newcomers knew that life would be hard, and that their hearts would hurt. They came here, and they made their declarations, in faith or hope that for their children, and their children’s children, things would be better.
Second, we need to consider just what the oath the homesteaders swore, and you are swearing today, means. To understand that calls on us to consider what it means to be an American.
To be an American is not a matter of soil, or language, or religion, or color, or culture, or lines on a map. To be an American is a matter of ideas. To be a good American, you have to embrace certain ideas. And what are these ideas?
Here is a book that I use as a text for courses in American history at North Dakota State University. It was written by a French author, Alexis de Tocqueville, in 1835, and its title is Democracy in America. In this work is a chapter entitled, “The Sovereignty of the People in America.” As to this question of what it means to be an American, Tocqueville tells us, “it is with the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people that we must begin. . . . The people reign in the American political world as the Deity does in the universe. They are the cause and the aim of all things; everything comes from them, and everything is absorbed in them.”
In the hour of our national crisis, the great Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln told us that ours is a nation "conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Our mission as Americans, and our obligation under the oaths we swear, is to ensure, as Lincoln charged us, "that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
~Tom Isern
