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  • 2006-04-11 (xsd:date)
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  • Theodore Roosevelt on Immigration (en)
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  • Theodore Roosevelt was about to finish his first two-year term as governor of the state of New York when the Republican Party chose him as its candidate for vice president in the 1900 national election. The Republicans were victorious at the ballot box that year, but Roosevelt held the vice-presidency for less than a year before he was elevated to the White House upon the assassination of President William McKinley on 14 September 1901, thereby becoming the youngest person ever to hold the office of President of the United States. Roosevelt was elected to a full term as president in 1904, and among his many notable achievements was his selection as a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate for his part in the negotiations leading to the Treaty of Portsmouth that ended the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. Although Roosevelt did not hold public office again after leaving the presidency in 1909 (his efforts to regain the White House as a third party candidate in 1912 proving unsuccessful), he remained active in the public political sphere. In the waning years of his life, as World War I raged in Europe and America entered the conflict on the side of the Allies, he frequently spoke of his belief that immigrants taking up residence in the U.S. should assimilate into American society as quickly as possible, learn the English language, eschew hyphenated national identities (e.g., Italian-American) and declare their primary national allegiance to the United States of America. On 1 February 1916, for example, Roosevelt advocated measures for strengthening and ensuring the loyalty of American immigrants: A few months later, Roosevelt expanded on this theme in a series of Memorial Day speeches he delivered in St. Louis: In a Fourth of July speech in 1917, Roosevelt urged the adoption of linguistic uniformity, including a requirement that all foreign-language newspapers published in the U.S. should also include English translations: Likewise, on 27 May 1918, Roosevelt urged in a speech at Des Moines, Iowa, that English be the sole language of instruction used in American schools: The comments quoted at this head of the page are more in the same vein; excerpts not from (as claimed in the accompanying text) a statement made by Theodore Roosevelt in 1907 (while he was still President), but from a letter written shortly before his death in January 1919, just a few months after the armistice that ended the fighting in World War I: A copy of this letter, obtained from the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, can be viewed here. (en)
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