Mightier Acorns

Long-time Mightier Acorns readers are probably familiar with some of the basic foundational concepts of genealogy and family history. You have probably seen references to “My Sixteen,” and if you have spent the time tracing your sixteen great-grandparents, you probably have a good understanding of who those sixteen people were and where their ancestors came from.

Probably.

And unless you or both of your parents were born in another country, the odds are that your family tree includes several generations of U.S. citizens – people who were born in the United States, educated in U.S. schools, fought in U.S. conflicts, and voted in U.S. elections. By any rational reckoning, if you have any of those kinds of roots here, you are an American¹ with an American heritage.

So when you see or hear news referencing “Heritage Americans,” you might not realize that the people using that term don’t mean you.

What Does It Mean?

I know people don’t like being assigned extra homework, but I encourage you to at least read the first part of “Are You a ‘Heritage American’?” from The Atlantic, written last October, for context. In it, the phrase is given some specific parameters that ought to trigger scepticism in any family historian:

The United States faces a fundamental rift “between heritage Americans and the new political class,” Auron MacIntyre, a columnist for Blaze Media, argued. “Heritage Americans—what are those?” [podcaster Tucker] Carlson asked.

“You could find their last names in the Civil War registry,” MacIntyre explained. This ancestry matters, he said, because America is not “a collection of abstract things agreed to in some social contract.” It is a specific set of people who embody an “Anglo-Protestant spirit” and “have a tie to history and to the land.”

For now, I’ll set aside the fact that the U.S. Constitution is being dismissed as “some social contract” here. But as someone who has spent a lot of time and effort going through “the Civil War registry” (which is not a single, simple thing, actually), this framing raises several objections. How many of one’s surnames does one need to find to qualify? Do maternal lines count? What about the German-Protestant spirit, or the many Catholic and Jewish families who fought in the Civil War? Why the Civil War? Why not the Second World War or the Revolution, if we’re arbitrarily choosing a watershed time period?

Perhaps I’m giving people like MacIntyre too much credit for knowing our history, but the Civil War (1861-1865) seems to have been chosen precisely because it sits in a place in U.S. history just before the railroads united the continental coasts and the growth of the Midwest began to turn us into a world power, instead of the remote backwater we had been during our first four score and seven years. It is recent enough to have better records, and it captured a moment in time after the U.S. absorbed nearly 100,000 Hispanic residents of Texas in 1845, but before immigration from Eastern Europe began to swell, leading to the need for places like Ellis Island (which opened in 1892).

Choosing the Civil War instead of the Revolution, or the descendants of the Mayflower, means that more people can more easily claim to share this heritage. Choosing the Civil War instead of the First or Second World Wars means it is easier to exclude all of the Black Americans who gained suffrage and fought in those wars, and dodges the uncomfortable fact that two-thirds of the Japanese people the U.S. put into concentration camps during WWII were, in fact, American citizens.

In other words, MacIntyre’s definition of Heritage American is obviously designed to only include specific people, and while that definition claims to “have a tie to history,” it ignores massive numbers of people who historically should be included. Since he doesn’t explicitly say he means “white people” (let alone define that concept), he can accuse anyone calling him out for his obvious racism of “bringing race into it” and pretend to be a victim.

All of this is designed to exploit people’s biases to create out-groups that don’t belong, and you don’t have to be a student of history to know where that leads.

What Am I?

By MacIntyre’s definition, I absolutely qualify as a “Heritage American.” Every one of My Sixteen was born in the U.S., and only one of them was born to immigrant parents – Emil Carl Adolph Frey, whose father came to the U.S. in time to serve in the U.S. Army during the Mexican War and the Civil War. Every one of their sixteen surnames appears in “the Civil War registry” – most on the Union side. And while the “Anglo” prefix probably applies to only 11 of the 16, they were certainly all members of Protestant faiths.

That said, this definition of “heritage” doesn’t include all of my family.

I have two cousins who married women whose parents were interned in those Japanese concentration camps.

I have cousins who found their way to the California-Mexico border and married Mexican citizens and/or members of indigenous American groups.

My wife’s family includes several Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian immigrants who came over after the Civil War.

I don’t need to have a provable family connection to understand that my Black cousins have as much right to be here as I do, or that my Native American cousins have every right to laugh a fool like MacIntyre back to Scotland for setting his parameters where he does.

Perhaps you object to my characterization of MacIntyre’s idea as “foolish”? If so, then you and MacIntyre are definitely not alone in holding onto the idea that certain groups belong and others don’t. Benjamin Franklin wrote this about the German-speaking settlers in Pennsylvania, after he began serving in the Pennsylvania legislative assembly:

“Few of their children in the country learn English; they import many books from Germany… The signs in our streets have inscriptions in both languages, and in some places only German. They begin of late to make all their bonds and other legal writings in their own language, which (though I think it ought not to be) are allowed good in our courts, where the German business so increases that there is continual need of interpreters; and I suppose in a few years they will also be necessary in the Assembly, to tell one half of our legislators what the other half say.”

In other places, he wrote of the impossibility of the two cultures mixing, and contrasted the German standards of beauty for their wives against those of the English in terms which, if he were saying them about specific ethnic groups today, would have likely scuttled his political career.

But unlike our modern champions of “Heritage America,” Ben Franklin went on to articulate the fundamental idea of unity between the colonies that allowed the Continental Army and Congress to force the break with Britain and found the United States. He was proven wrong about the future he predicted. His forecast of an untenable, unbridgeable split between English and German speakers clearly did not come to pass, as evidenced by my Witter, Piper (Pfeiffer), Huff, Cline, Shriver, and Opp ancestors.

The lesson I take from this is that arguments warning of seemingly permanent, trending, and eternally intolerable differences between groups of people should not be treated with the weight that people give them. They are specious arguments that assume people aren’t capable of growing, changing, or setting aside their differences to come together for their common good when necessary.

Or, to put it another way, the words we use to identify ourselves are always just words. When it comes to how we live and how we treat each other as neighbors, words aren’t what matter. Boring, everyday action matters.

Being Boring Makes Us Great

There is a seemingly unavoidable bias in the study of history towards emphasizing wars and conflicts. Even if your ancestors didn’t fight in a particular war, their lives were probably shaped around it. (Why do you think so many of those immigrants came to North America during the wars and upheavals throughout Europe?) When people talk about what their culture means and what is important to their identity, they often point to Great Deeds (in battle) done by people (usually men) who looked like them to define that identity.

That’s because War and Heroes make exciting narratives.

But when I study my family history, I find that the wars and the disruptions aren’t the part of the story that matters. What matters is that when the four or eight years of war were over, the soldiers went home and raised their families. They, along with their wives and other members who get erased from “the registry,” built their communities. They invested their time and energy into growing food, building houses, and schools. And they did that for countless boring years on end.

I often think about the words Lin-Manuel Miranda had George Washington say to Alexander Hamilton:

“Dying is easy, son, living is harder.”

The truly important things, the things that make a living and make us good neighbors and strong families, are not done on a battlefield. They’re done in the kitchen or in the daily grind of existence. The things that make a common culture are things like good food and showing up for each other in times of crisis. And they include putting up with people you may not like very much, for whatever reason.

As far as I’m concerned, if you or your parents came to live near where I am, built a life, learned a second (or third) language, and are willing to put up with the extra burdens carried by people who are “not from here,” you belong here as much as I do.

I learned from studying my family history and Benjamin Franklin’s mistake. Our differences may make it impossible for us to see it now, but I am confident that being patient with each other and making it possible to do the boring things necessary for living is better for us all than creating unnecessary divisions that keep us apart.

After all, we’re all cousins if you can go back far enough.

1. I think it’s worth pointing out that the U.S. is only a part of America – as much as that fact may anger some of the people mentioned in this post. ↩︎