Tony Smith, Foreign Attachments: The Power of Ethnic Groups in the Making of American Foreign Policy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
From the days of the Founding Fathers, who were forced to contend with a good deal of regionalism, the search for national unity has been a perennial American goal. That aspiration was captured in the happy Latin phrase of Benjamin Franklin, e pluribus unum, inscribed upon our coinage. After the close of the Civil War, the focus of that quest began to shift toward ethnic divisions in the body politic. Indeed, concern about "ethnic politics" can be traced back a long way. In my office in Washington, there hangs a cover from a Harper's Weekly of 1877 -- with a set of Irish-American protesters, gathered under the banner of Saint Patrick, proclaiming, "we demand in the interest of the Irish people", and a similar group of (potbellied) German-American protesters, gathered under the banner of Saint Gambrinus, proclaiming, "we demand in the interest of the German people." The message is direct: Uncle Sam says, "If you come simply as Americans, this is the place. But if you persist in your distinct nationality, you must call at the State Department, where all foreign affairs are considered."
With the explosion of immigration at the end of the century and the emergence in 1898 of the United States as a world power, the challenge presented by ethnic politics began to intensify. At the time of the First World War, it led to considerable bitterness about "hyphenated-Americans."
