Ross Douthat, the columnist the New York Times hired to prove it is not biased against fools, pines for the good old days when immigrants (great waves of them!) were greeted on these sylvan shores with cudgels and tough love and serious hazing...
Op-Ed Columnist - Islam and the Two Americas - NYTimes.com
During the great waves of 19th-century immigration, the insistence that new arrivals adapt to Anglo-Saxon culture — and the threat of discrimination if they didn’t — was crucial to their swift assimilation. The post-1920s immigration restrictions were draconian in many ways, but they created time for persistent ethnic divisions to melt into a general unhyphenated Americanism.
The amusing thing - amusing once one gets past the total idiocy of Douthat's column (the link above) is that it was written, presumably, in New York, one of the most ethnically organized cities I've ever been in. When I lived there, admittedly a long time ago, in local elections each party ran a three-man (yes, man) ticket for the three most powerful offices in the city: mayor, Manhattan borough president, and attorney general (I think) (something something) - and the conventional political wisdom was the ticket must include a Jew, and Italian, and an Irishman:
True, these guys had no hyphens.
Come to think of it, what kind of name is Douthat? It sounds foreign to me.
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