Lincoln's Electric Cord and the Case for a Civic Nation Anyone Can Join

There are two ways to join a nation. You can be born into it, or you can be persuaded into it. Most countries on earth offer the first. Exactly one was founded to offer the second.

That is the claim of this post, and it comes with a hard edge for people on both sides of today's argument. The left tells us that asking newcomers to become American is a kind of cultural violence. A slice of the right tells us it cannot be done, or that the people who might do it are the wrong sort. Both are wrong, and the strongest refutation of both is a speech Abraham Lincoln gave on a hot July evening in Chicago, to a crowd that had come to hear his opponent's argument answered.

The claim, in terms

Define the words, because this argument is wrecked every day by sloppy ones. A nation, in the sense that matters here, is a people bound together by something they hold in common. The question is what the something is.

Ethnic nationalism says the bond is ancestry: blood, soil, a shared origin. On this view you are one of us because your parents were, and you cannot become one of us if they were not. Civic nationalism says the bond is a set of principles and the institutions that embody them: a creed. On this view you are one of us if you hold the creed, live under the laws and take on the duties, regardless of where your grandparents were born.

I will argue the following, in numbered form.

1. The United States was founded on a creed, not a bloodline.
2. A creedal nation can be joined by anyone who adopts the creed, and Lincoln said so in plain words.
3. A creedal nation therefore requires assimilation to the creed, because without the creed there is nothing to join.
4. Assimilation to a creed is not oppression, since the creed is a charter of rights, and it is not impossible, since the record shows it working.
5. The naturalization oath is the creed in the form of a contract.

What Lincoln said and when

The date is July 10, 1858. Lincoln was running for the United States Senate in Illinois against Stephen Douglas, and the two men were shadowing each other across the state before the famous debates began that August. Douglas had spoken in Chicago the night before, and Lincoln answered him from the balcony of the Tremont House.

Douglas had offered his own exposition of what the Declaration means, and Lincoln, in his reply, summarized it as saying that the people of America are equal to the people of England, and that the government was made for white men. Lincoln's answer ranged widely, but one passage has outlived the rest. He turned to the question of what the Declaration means to Americans who have no ancestor who signed it. He observed that perhaps half the people of the country were not descended from the men who wrote it, having come from Europe or descended from those who had, and so they could not trace their connection to the Founders by blood.

What do they do, then? Lincoln said they look into the Declaration and find the principle that all men are created equal, and they feel that the moral sentiment it teaches is the father of all moral principle in them. They have a right, he said, to claim it as though they were "blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh" of the men who wrote it. And then comes the line:

That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.

Read it twice. Lincoln is saying that a man whose family arrived last year is as fully an heir of 1776 as a man whose family arrived in 1620, and he is saying it because the inheritance is moral and intellectual rather than genetic. The electric cord is an idea, and anyone can plug into it.

The Declaration is the creed

Now check Lincoln's claim against the text he was invoking. The Declaration of Independence, adopted July 4, 1776, does not say "We, the descendants of Englishmen, hold that our ancestry entitles us to rule ourselves." It says:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

The grounds of the claim are universal. Rights come from the Creator and belong to "all men." The justification for independence is not that the colonists are a special breed, but that a government has violated rights that belong to everyone, and "Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." That is a creed. It could be adopted by a Frenchman, a Pole, a Kenyan or a Korean, and it has been, countless times, by people who took the oath.

This is what is new about America. Other nations of the founding era, and most since, defined themselves by a people. The Americans defined themselves by a proposition, and a proposition can be accepted by anyone who is persuaded of it. Lincoln would later call it, at Gettysburg, a nation "conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."

A creed requires assimilation, and that is a feature

Here is the point that makes some people uncomfortable, so let me make it plainly. If the nation is a creed, then becoming a member means adopting the creed. That is assimilation. It is not an optional extra.

I do not mean abandoning your food, your faith, your music, your family traditions, the language of your grandmother or the name of your village. A creed that demanded those would not be a charter of liberty. It would be a tyranny. The First Amendment protects the free exercise of religion, and the American tradition of voluntary associations, churches, clubs and ethnic societies is among the glories of the country. A person can be Italian American, Korean American, Lebanese American, and be wholly American.

I mean something narrower and harder. A person has to accept the principles of self-government: that power comes from the consent of the governed, that the law binds rulers and ruled alike, that rights belong to individuals and are not granted by the powerful, that disputes are settled by votes and courts and not by force, and that one's loyalty is to the Constitution and not to a foreign sovereign. Those are non-negotiable, because they are the thing that is being joined. A man who says "I would like to live in the United States but I reject the idea that the government rests on consent" has not misunderstood a detail. He has declined the membership.

And a practical point. A creed is carried by a common language, a common civic education and shared institutions. That is why English as a Common Language Is a Gift to Newcomers, Not a Barrier is not a prejudice against anyone, and why the argument in The Melting Pot Was a Good Idea and the Salad Bowl Is a Worse One matters. You cannot take part in a self-governing people if you cannot take part in its conversation.

The objection from the left: assimilation is oppression

State the best form of it, fairly. The case runs: "Assimilation" has often meant forced conformity. Schools punished children for speaking their parents' language. Indigenous children were taken from their families. Immigrants were told to change their names and to be ashamed of their origins. A demand to assimilate is a demand to erase, and a country built on the idea of liberty should celebrate difference and not flatten it.

Some of that history is real, and no conservative should defend it. Forcible removal of children from their families is not assimilation to a creed of liberty. It is a violation of that creed. Shaming a child for his mother tongue is cruel and was never required by the Declaration.

But the objection confuses the creed with the coercion. The creed is a charter of freedom. The thing you are asked to adopt is the principle that protects the immigrant's right to keep his religion, speak his language at home, start a business and criticize the government. A person who adopts it is joining a society in which no one can take those things away. The demand to assimilate to American civic principles is a demand to join the very order that protects diversity of belief.

And consider what the alternative offers. A country that refuses to ask anything of newcomers is not being gentle. It is telling them that there is no "us" to join, only a collection of groups in competition. The immigrant who is told that nothing is expected of him is being told that he is not really being welcomed into anything. Lincoln's invitation is more respectful: you may claim the whole inheritance, and the price is to share the principle.

The objection from the right: it cannot be done

Now the other side. State this one fairly too. It says: a creed is a nice idea, but nations are made of peoples, and peoples have histories, habits and loyalties that do not dissolve in an oath. Common ancestry, a common religion and a common culture are what make a country cohere. Even the Founders thought so. John Jay, in Federalist No. 2, wrote of Americans as "one united people," a people "descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government." If assimilation worked in the past, the objector says, it was because the newcomers were similar to the people already here and because the numbers were manageable.

This is a serious argument and it deserves a serious answer. Three points.

First, Jay's sentence is a description of the Americans of 1787, not a rule for who may become one. The Constitution Jay was defending contains no ancestry test. The Framers gave Congress the power "To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization" (Article I, Section 8, Clause 4), and the first Congress used it in 1790. Jay wrote about the happy accident of homogeneity, and the Framers' own legal text made no ancestry a condition of membership. The text beats the description.

Second, the record of assimilation across American history is not a record of arrivals who were already similar. The Germans of the eighteenth century, the Irish of the 1840s, the Italians, Poles, Jews and Chinese of later decades were each told they were too different, too clannish, too loyal to a foreign church or too unfit for self-government. A great many nineteenth-century Americans said it of Catholics. They were wrong, and the proof is in the grandchildren. The same worry has been voiced against nearly every wave, and the pattern of the outcome is strong evidence that the creed does its work. The National Academies' finding that the second generation is among the strongest contributors, discussed in What the National Academies Found on Immigration's Fiscal Costs, is one measure of it.

Third, the objection is half right, and the half matters. Assimilation does not happen by magic. It happens through institutions that do the work: schools that teach American history and civics, a common language, a labor market that rewards effort, churches and civic groups, and a self-confident culture that believes its own creed is worth passing on. When those institutions fail, assimilation fails, and the failure is a failure of the host country, not of the newcomers. If you believe in a creedal nation, you owe the creed a defense: a civics curriculum that teaches the Declaration without apology, a naturalization test that means something (see Twelve Questions From the Citizenship Civics Test and the Answers Behind Them) and a pace of arrival the institutions can absorb. The point of the right's worry is correct. The conclusion drawn from it, that assimilation cannot work, is not.

Theodore Roosevelt saw it too

The same idea appears a half-century after Lincoln in Theodore Roosevelt's 1915 warning against what he called hyphenated Americanism, which is read closely in Teddy Roosevelt's 1915 Warning Against Hyphenated Americanism, Read Closely. Roosevelt's complaint was not that anyone should drop their heritage. It was that a citizen's political loyalty had to run to the United States and not to a foreign power. That is the civic conception in a single sentence: bring your heritage, and give your allegiance to the creed.

The oath as the creed in contract form

Now the close, the part where the argument becomes a ceremony. Every naturalized citizen, by law, takes an oath. The words in the regulations read as follows:

I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I will bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform work of national importance under civilian direction when required by the law; and that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; so help me God.

Notice what it asks. It asks for a renunciation of a prior political allegiance. It asks for a promise to support and defend the Constitution. It asks for a willingness to serve. It says nothing about ancestry, religion, language of the home or taste in food. It is the electric cord written as a legal obligation. A person who says those words and means them has done what Lincoln said anyone could do: claimed the inheritance of the Founders as his own.

And notice that the oath is a promise made freely, "without any mental reservation." The nation that asks for it is a nation that takes the question of consent seriously, since consent of the governed is the creed itself. The ceremony is the Declaration's logic in miniature: a government that rests on the consent of those who choose it.

What this means for policy

A creedal nation is open to anyone willing to adopt the creed. It is not therefore required to admit anyone at any rate. A nation with a creed has a duty to preserve the conditions in which the creed can be taught and absorbed, and that means attention to numbers, to selection and to the strength of the assimilating institutions. A country that admits more people than its schools, its churches, its labor market and its civic culture can absorb is not being generous to the creed. It is endangering the machine that makes newcomers into fellow citizens.

That is why the civic case for a careful and lawful system and the civic case for welcoming newcomers are the same case. The first protects the ability to do the second. For the Founders' own views of the tension, see What Washington, Hamilton and Jefferson Feared and Hoped About Newcomers.

The case in brief

1. The United States was founded on a creed, the Declaration's proposition that all men are created equal and endowed with unalienable rights, and not on a bloodline.
2. On July 10, 1858, in Chicago, Lincoln described the Declaration as an "electric cord" that links the hearts of liberty-loving people, including those with no ancestor at the Founding.
3. Because the nation is a creed, joining it means adopting the creed, and that assimilation is a path to the protection of one's own freedoms and not an erasure of identity.
4. The left errs in calling assimilation oppression, and the right errs in calling it impossible, since the record of every wave of arrivals shows it working when the institutions do their job.
5. The naturalization oath is the creed in contract form, and a country that takes it seriously will teach it, test it and protect the pace at which it can be absorbed.

What you can do: read the Declaration of Independence aloud once this week, to your family or a friend, and then look up the date and place of the next naturalization ceremony in your county and consider attending as a guest.