An Ode to the Unhyphenated American (Part 1)
A breakdown of Stephen Wolfe's speech at the New Christendom Press Conference
Last month, Stephen Wolfe, author of The Case for Christian Nationalism, gave a speech at the inaugural conference for a new Christian Nationalist publishing house, New Christendom Press, entitled “Why Multicultural Pluralism Fails.” The speech is so full of explicit white-ethnocentrism that it caught the ire of mainstream Christian social media. Consequently, as the ethno-nationalist underpinnings of Wolfe’s worldview (which I detail in my book) are becoming more apparent, he is in the process of being pushed even further to the fringes of academia.
Still, while there are clearly abhorrent statements that Wolfe makes in the speech, that can be easily picked up on by the average listener, there are sly turns of phrase and esoteric references in nearly every sentence. The speech is an ode to an era of nativist and eugenicist thought that most Americans are unaware of, because its philosophy has become taboo (for good reason) and its players have been relegated to the shadows of history. Rather than write a counter-essay to Wolfe, I will, much like my book, present direct quotes from the speech and add historical context. My hope is that, by the end, it will be undeniable that Wolfe and those who follow him exhibit a ridiculously revisionist view of American history, and, more importantly, seek to revive one of its most shameful movements. Let’s begin.
The strong feeling of peoplehood is true for a significant portion of those who even make their living in the United States, whose bodies are in the US, but whose hearts remain in Mexico or Africa or the Vatican or the Levant.
Right at the outset of his speech Wolfe invokes the fear of the ethnic other, but, while the references to Latino, black and Jewish people having dual loyalties should be apparent to the average listener, his reference to the Vatican may seem out of place—it most certainly is not. The history of anti-immigration in America is also the history of anti-Catholicism. In the early-to-mid 19th century, this religious prejudice was most often directed towards Irish and German immigrants, resulting in regular breakouts of mob violence around the nation. This anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant fervor peaked with the meteoric rise, and near-overnight fall, of the secretive Know-Nothing party in the 1850s. After the Civil War created its own postwar consensus of sorts, this sentiment laid mostly dormant, but for a few small “Protestant associations.”
Then, with the new wave of European immigration at the turn of the century, the historic dual American prejudice saw a massive resurgence. Now it was mainly directed at Eastern and Southern Europeans, assisted by the new pseudoscience of phrenology, which purported to prove that the world, even the various regions of Europe, could be split into “races” with different immutable traits, including intelligence and virtue. Nativists used books like William Ripley’s The Races of Europe as proof that groups such as Poles and Italians, mostly Catholic, were not only seeking to subvert our Protestant nation with their primary loyalty to the Pope, but that they were “mongrelizing” the supposedly superior Anglo-American race. As we will see, Wolfe’s speech draws its primary inspiration from this era.
A nation of immigrants can be nothing less than a hodge podge of groups from somewhere other than the soil they currently depend on. America in this conception is the universal place—a space for everyone—a “no place.” … America is a land for people whose place lies on foreign shores and to be truly American is to fight and even die to make this land a “no place,” a geographic space, an economic zone for any and all. There is no distinct American ethnicity, a distinct people and place, so we're told, America is the “universal nation.” … The deeper meaning of life, the sort of things that the heart owns such as ethnic identity, cultural particularity, or a strong connection of people and place must be supplied or rooted outside of America.
Note the use of the words “soil” and “rooted” in reference to the spirit and self-perception of the nation. The Reich Minister of Nutrition and Agriculture, Richard Darré, had a term for this conception of people and place, a spiritual element to the affection one has for his landed property and his volk: Blut und Boden (Blood and Soil). At this point, the connection may seem tenuous, but this will build into a major theme of Wolfe’s speech, and I will note every allusion to people (blood) and place (soil). Regardless, Wolfe explicitly tied these sentiments to the term in a recent interview with Christian Nationalist pastor and podcaster Joel Webbon, saying, “There is this thing that is—in a way—emplaced or embodied in the place. And so, of course your ancestry matters. I mean, people call that ‘blood and soil,’ but are you just dumb?… Who can be so unfeeling that they wouldn’t have something—some connection to that that is beyond ‘property rights’ or something like that?”
Thus, the true Americans in new America are the hyphenated Americans. In a sense, these people are more complete human beings than the unhyphenated. Why? Because they have settled hearts with a people and a place—albeit a foreign place—while the unhyphenated have no place of their own. But we, the unhyphenated, those who trace our ancestry to Western Europe—whose roots extend beyond the Immigration Act of 1965 [and] Ellis Island and which unite to this soil—we the White Anglo Saxon Protestants who founded, built and died for, and led this country for most of its history—we are not permitted in this new America to have a people or a place that is distinctly ours.
Here we are presented with another reference to dual-loyalties and “people and place,” but we are also treated to Wolfe’s first reference of “hyphenated Americans.” This concept is directly ripped from the aforementioned era of eugenicist-nativist philosophy. Most famously used by Theodore Roosevelt in a controversial 1915 speech to the Catholic Knights of Columbus, the term was originally coined in the late-19th century to decry the mass immigration of non-Anglo/Teutonic Europeans, and always had a eugenic edge.
With this eugenic mindset, anti-immigrant legislators, such as Henry Cabot Lodge (whom Wolfe will later reference), repeatedly sought to limit immigration into the United States via a quota system that preserved the ethnic makeup of the nation. The Immigration Act of 1924 succeeded in instituting this quota system, most significantly limiting European immigration from Eastern and Southern nations, and outright banning immigration from Asia. It would not be overturned until 1965. Ironically, in his book, Wolfe claimed to have “Italian, German, and English” ancestry,1 meaning that he is descended from some of the very people whose immigration was limited by the proponents of the philosophy he invokes. While, in his speech, he claims to be genetically linked to “Western Europe,” the first ancestry listed in his book is from Southern Europe, considered a “lesser race” by the very people who most commonly used the term “hyphenated American.” The eugenicist Madison Grant who, in 1916, penned the most popular book among this set, The Passing of the Great Race, noted that the “Mediterranean subspecies” in some regions “overlies an even more ancient Negroid race.”2
Wolfe’s first use of “White Anglo Saxon Protestant” should also be noted, in that it is a term invented in the 1950s by political scientist Andrew Hacker, in which the W stood for “wealthy.” It was primarily a sociological term meant to describe what some might call “old-money” power-brokers. Thus, Wolfe takes a term that is a product of his dreaded enemy, “the postwar consensus,” meant to describe his other enemy, the people behind “the globalist American empire,” and repurposes it as a catchall for a generic white consciousness. This is especially ironic, considering he dedicates much of the speech to directly attacking these two elements. Considering that, like Hacker, Wolfe has a PhD in political science, he likely knows all of this and is consciously propagandizing the term for his audience who does not know the origins of WASP.
Yet, the country that our ancestors built is no longer for us—for those whose hearts are settled here like us. It is not for those whose people are Old Stock Americans, whose people as a group were generated before, during, and soon after the American Founding. We are not permitted to identify with this ancestry in any strong sense, at least. We cannot call ourselves “Heritage Americans.”
Now Wolfe moves into the most common theme of early-20th-century authoritarian rightists, that of the true people of the nation being supplanted by an international cabal. Here, Wolfe’s allusion to those whose “hearts remain in… the Levant” should be remembered, because there was no more common enemy to both European and American authoritarians than the antisemitic caricature of “the international banker.” Wolfe uses as a synonym to “Old Stock Americans” (a group that, at least partially, he does not belong to), the term “Heritage Americans.” He is consciously using the term as it has become directly associated with the Dissident Right podcaster C.Jay Engel. Using it in direct contrast to a perceived globalist threat, Engel believes that “Heritage Americans are waking up to the fact that they have been conned by an internationalist ideology.” Engel has a side-business marketing audiobooks from the explicitly white nationalist publishing house Antelope Hill, including the autobiography of an unrepentant Nazi collaborator and Holocaust denier, Léon Degrelle, further confirming that he is using this terminology in a white nationalist context. This “internationalist ideology” is the same force Wolfe claims is attempting to turn America into “a ‘no place,’ a geographic space, an economic zone for any and all.”
Wolfe has set the stage with his key talking points:
White Anglo Saxon Protestants (a poorly repurposed term) are not allowed to publicly express their ethnic heritage.
Other ethnic groups, including Jews and Catholics, are allowed to publicly express their ethnic heritage.
These “hyphenated Americans” are allowed to have “settled hearts with a people [blood] and a place [soil]—albeit a foreign place,” while White Anglo Saxon Protestants are made to be a people of “no place.”
To be continued…
Stephen Wolfe, The Case for Christian Nationalism (Moscow, Idaho: Canon Press, 2022), 136.
Madison Grant and Henry Fairfield Osborn, The Passing of the Great Race; or, The Racial Basis of European History. 4th Rev. Ed., with a Documentary Supplement, with Prefaces by Henry Fairfield Osborn (New York Scribner, 1922), 148–49, http://archive.org/details/passingofgreatra00granuoft.
I genuinely do not understand how all this blood and soil stuff makes any sense from an American perspective. I live in rural Denmark (although am not Danish) and most Danes can actually more or less say that their ancestors have been working this soil for hundreds if not thousands of years, whatever policy implications that may or may not have. But you are actually all mixed-up immigrants! Surely the most logical conclusion of this thinking would be restoring the land to Native Americans? but those sorts of ideas rarely go down well in Wolfe's circles, to put it mildly. Does he ever deal with this apparent tension?
This is a very helpful and needed review. It is important to set Wolfe's modern racism in historical context. One point - WASP did begin as you suggest but the W was repurposed much earlier and not just by Wolfe. I can recall White Anglo-Saxon Protestant being used in the 1960s. I can provide cites if needed. Looking forward to the next installment!