A Throwback from the Korean War in 1952!!!
Happy New Year!!!

Brig. Gen. Benjamin O. Davis, Sr., the first African-American general in the U.S. Army, watches a Signal Corps crew erecting poles, somewhere in France. August 8, 1944. His son, Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., graduated from West Point and commanded the Tuskegee Airmen.

The Federalist Papers
January 1, 2012
·
There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism.

When I refer to hyphenated Americans, I do not refer to naturalized Americans. Some of the very best Americans I have ever known were naturalized Americans, Americans born abroad.

But a hyphenated American is not an American at all. This is just as true of the man who puts 'native' before the hyphen as of the man who puts German or Irish or English or French before the hyphen.

Americanism is a matter of the spirit and of the soul. Our allegiance must be purely to the United States. We must unsparingly condemn any man who holds any other allegiance. But if he is heartily and singly loyal to this Republic, then no matter where he was born, he is just as good an American as any one else.

The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans, or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that nationality than with the other citizens of the American Republic.

The men who do not become Americans and nothing else are hyphenated Americans; and there ought to be no room for them in this country. The man who calls himself an American citizen and who yet shows by his actions that he is primarily the citizen of a foreign land, plays a thoroughly mischievous part in the life of our body politic. He has no place here; and the sooner he returns to the land to which he feels his real heart-allegiance, the better it will be for every good American.

There is no such thing as a hyphenated American who is a good American. The only man who is a good American is the man who is an American and nothing else.
Theodore Roosevelt, Address to Knights of Columbus (Oct. 12, 1915)

OTD:
- 45 B.C.: The Julian calendar takes effect, so people celebrate New Year's Eve for the first time.
- 1863: The Emancipation Proclamation takes effect, President Lincoln's Executive Order that slavery be abolished in all states where it is being practiced, allowing people in those regions to be Free.
- 1892: Ellis Island opens its doors in New York Harbor, Welcoming millions of immigrants in the coming decades to America hoping for a better life.
- 1919: A guy with a strange name steps into his father's shoes as Edsel Ford takes the reigns from Henry as President of Ford Motor Company.
- 1959: Dictator Fulgencio Batista flees Cuba as rebels fighting under revolutionary Fidel Castro take control of the island, a bloody revolution which Castro promised would "free all the people" later imprisoning tens of thousands under his even more brutal dictatorship, a curiosity which has somehow managed to remain in effect in other brutal dictatorships around the world (North Korea, Iran, others) as their citizens have yet to figure out how to set their minds - and themselves Free.

Kentucky National Guard Sergeant Leigh Ann Hester was the first woman to receive the Silver Star since WWII. She humbly accepted her medal saying, "It really doesn't have anything to do with being a female - it's about the duties I performed that day as a Soldier."
We salute Sergeant Hester and all our Heroes as we begin a New Year!
Freedom On, Warriors!
NSDQ!