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“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. 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...

John Wayne explains the damaging use of the hyphen in our American name.

The Hyphen, Webster's Dictionary defines, Is a symbol used to divide a compound word or a single word. So it seems to me that when a man calls himself An "Afro-American," a "Mexican-American," "Italian-American," An "Irish-American," "Jewish-American," What he's sayin' is, "I'm a divided American." Well, we all came from other places, Different creeds and different races, To form a nation...to become as one, Yet look at the harm a line has done- A simple little line, and yet As divisive as a line can get. A crooked cross the Nazis flew, And the Russian hammer and sickle too- Time...