By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff
Add another entry in the ever-expanding catalog of lies, intellectual abuses and inanities that define the Trump administration, with the remarks delivered July 5 by Vice President JD Vance upon his acceptance of the Claremont Institute’s “statesmanship award.”
Speaking to members of what he described as the “intellectual center for California conservatism” and “the only group in California that makes me seem just like a reasonable moderate,” Vance centered his 35-minute speech on the notion of defining American citizenship, couching it in a pack of ahistorical and nativist claptrap that would get him laughed out of any actual “intellectual center.”
First he suggested that “the left” wants to “replace” the “native-born” “with people who will listen to their increasingly bizarre ethnic and religious appeals.”
Later, he argued against “identifying America just with agreeing with the principles, let’s say, of the Declaration of Independence.” To do so, he went on, would require admitting “hundreds of millions, maybe billions of foreign citizens” while also “reject[ing] a lot of people that the ADL would label as domestic extremists, even though those very Americans had their ancestors fight in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War.”
Getting to the point, he added, “I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don’t belong.”
In other words: Some Americans are more “American” than others, because “our shared qualities, our heritage, our values, our manners and customs confer a special and indispensable advantage.”
This was pretty rich coming from Mr. Hillbilly Elegy — and the husband of a first-generation Indian-American wife — but it also completely ignores the complicated history of how Americans have defined themselves.
When my Hagadone (née Hagedorn) ancestors arrived in New York colony fresh off a repurposed slave ship in 1709, they were German-speaking indentured servants bound for labor on an oligarch’s plantation in the Hudson Valley (he referred to it as his “manor”).
They had more in common with today’s itinerant farm workers than any glorious colonial American tradition. They really wanted their freedom, though, and so they and their fellow Rhineland migrants broke their contract and went to live among the Mohicans, who agreed to let them form settlements in present-day Schoharie County.
My ancestors rejected both imperial British and American colonial authority, preferring to find their liberty elsewhere with the actual native-born Americans — the total opposite of Vance’s ridiculous vision that “our ancestors … carve[d] a successful nation from new land” and “tame[d] a wild continent. That is our heritage as Americans.”
While conducting research for my master’s in early American history, I visited the archives in Schoharie County, where I found records of my family’s participation in the Revolutionary War. But, again, opposite of Vance’s hackneyed portrait of the exceptional American, I had one ancestor serving as a lieutenant in the New York militia fighting the British while his father hid British-hired Hessian mercenaries in the barn back home. I suspect he did so because those soldiers came from the same region of Germany as his own ancestors, and though he was by then a second-generation “native-born” American, he saw them as his fellow countrymen.
Being an “American” has never been anywhere near so simplistic as Vance would argue, though that crude and baseless reasoning animates the brutality and bigotry of the Trump administration’s approach to immigration, naturalization and citizenship — with inhumane effects.
True, my ancestors fought in the Revolution and the Civil War, but that provides me with no “special and indispensable advantage” nor gives me “a hell of a lot more claim over America” than anyone else. To argue otherwise is to assume there is an inherent aristocracy of American old stock, and I can’t think of anything more un-American than that.
