Roger Kimball writes about “The Hyphen and the Melting Pot.” It is an important article to read for those of us talking about immigration and assimilation.

He reminds us that the image of a melting pot came from a French-born American farmer whose image of an American was one in which “individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men.” Eventually, immigrants shed a previous identity to become a new one.

Unfortunately, he argues, a favorite weapon of multiculturalism is the lowly hyphen. Describing oneself at African-American or Mexican-American is not descriptive but deconstructive.

Americans in previous generations warned us about this. Frederick Douglass, for example, was critical of such a designation. “No one idea has given rise to more oppression and persecution toward colored people of this country than that which makes Africa, not America, their home.”

President Teddy Roosevelt warned about this in his autobiography. “The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.” He then went on to warn of the destructive vogue for “hyphenated Americans.”

The pattern of assimilation was clearly described by Justice Louis Brandeis in 1915. Americanization, he said, means that the immigrant “adopts the clothes, the manners, and the customs generally prevailing here . . . substitutes for his mother tongue the English language” and comes “into complete harmony with our ideals and aspirations and cooperate[s] with us for their attainment.”

That story is very different today. We no longer require immigrants to learn the language and history of this country. During this 250thanniversary, we should remember the wise words of Americans in previous generations.