Hyphenated American

In the United States, the term hyphenated American refers to the use of a hyphen (in some styles of writing) between the name of an ethnicity and the word American in compound nouns, e.g., as in Irish-American. Calling a person a "hyphenated American" was used as an insult alleging divided political or national loyalties, especially in times of war. It was used from 1890 to 1920 to disparage Americans who were of foreign birth or ancestry and who displayed an affection for their ancestral heritage language and culture. It was most commonly used during World War I against Americans from White ethnic backgrounds who favored United States neutrality during the ongoing conflict or who opposed the idea of an American military alliance with the British Empire and the creation of what is now called the "Special Relationship", even for purely political reasons.^[1]

In this context, the term "the hyphen" was a metonymical reference to this kind of ethnicity descriptor, and "dropping the hyphen" referred to full integration into the American identity.^[2] Some contemporary critics of this concept, such as Randolph Bourne in his criticism of the Preparedness Movement, accused America's White Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite of hypocrisy, Anglophilia, mimicry of the British upper class, and showing the same divided loyalty in pushing for the "Special Relationship" that they refused to tolerate in others.^[3] Other contemporaries, like Bishop John Joseph Frederick Otto Zardetti, argued eloquently that there is no contradiction between American patriotism and loyalty to one's ancestral culture, religion, and heritage language.^[4] In a 1916 letter to the Minneapolis Journal, one Minnesota German-American suggested that his own people would willingly "abandon the hyphen", but only if "Anglo-Americans" did so first.^[5]

Contemporary studies and debates refer to Hyphenated-American identities to discuss issues such as multiculturalism and immigration in the U.S. political climate; however, the term "hyphen" is rarely used per the recommendation of modern style guides. In their 2018 biography of Dominican-American poetess Rhina Espaillat, who is known for encouraging both bilingualism and American patriotism among younger people who speak immigrant languages, Nancy Kang and Silvio Torres-Saillant criticized how, in American political discourse for decades after Espaillat's 1938 arrival as a political refugee in the United States, both the English only movement and, "the expectation that one should overcome any non-British ancestral origins, still held sway as a prerequisite to entering the sphere of genuine Americanness". Both authors also singled out the role of Woodrow Wilson and his Pueblo speech in the lengthy survival of these concepts for special criticism.^[6]