Political Quotes

“Mr. President, there is a French farmer by the name of Hector St. John de Crevecoeur. He immigrated to the United States from Normandy, France, in 1759, and he settled in the Hudson Valley. He married an American woman. The astounding diversity of those who settled around him, his fellow farmers, was shocking to him. He said: It is ``a mixture of English, Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans, and Swedes.'' There was one family he knew who had an English grandfather, a Dutch grandmother, an Anglo-Saxon son who had a French wife, whose four sons all married women who were from different places of different nationalities. Hector said: ``From this promiscuous breed, that race now called Americans has arisen.'' He asked: ``What then is the American, this new man?'' This farmer who came to America from Normandy in 1759 wrote this: He is an American, who leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. The American is the new man who acts upon new principles. . . . Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men. George Washington told us that the bosom of America is open to the oppressed and the persecuted of all nations and religions. That great American philosopher, Alexis de Tocqueville, that observer of American life, said in a letter: Imagine, my dear friend, if you can, a society formed of all the nations of the world . . .…”