The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization

by Patrick J. Buchanan

Some define a nation as one people of common ancestry, language, literature, history, heritage, heroes, traditions, customs, mores, and faith who have lived together over time on the same land under the same rulers. This is the blood-and-soil idea of a nation. Among those who pressed this definition were Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, who laid down these conditions on immigrants: “They must cast off the European skin, never to resume it. They must look forward to their posterity rather than backward to their ancestors.”80 Theodore Roosevelt, who thundered against “hyphenated-Americanism,” seemed to share Adams’s view. Woodrow Wilson, speaking to newly naturalized Americans in 1915 in Philadelphia, echoed T.R.: “A man who thinks of himself as belonging to a particular national group in America has yet to become an American.”