Cultural Preservation Quotes
Although Jefferson was a strong immigration enthusiast, he and others were concerned about the ghettoization. The early German immigrants did not universally adopt English, just as today’s immigrants do not all. This was a concern of Americans since the first immigrations. Yet it has always occurred despite concerns about it. However, the second and third generations all become fluent and literate in English.
President-elect Kennedy had asked the poet to write and present a poem for the inaugural.
The great wall of China was built just as much to keep the Chinese in as to keep the barbarians out.
The Chinese 1st Emperor had unified China by brutal war. His troops and government were more sophisticated than the others and they were particularly sophisticated about drafting soldiers, forcing the civilian population to manufacture weapons for the huge military and to levy and collect taxes. Many people in the conquered provinces fled from China. The Emperor responded to the outside ‘barbarians’ and the fleeing Chinese by connecting the many walls that existed on the Chinese border into one unified wall as much to keep his labor force in China as to keep others out.
Most of her modern admirers tend to repress this quotation which is very embarrassing for most modern conservatives. However, there is a minority of thinkers who maintain that land, unused, is open to anyone who will make use of it to improve civilization. Many conservationists, in contrast, extol unused land for preservation.
Tibet and some other ethnic enclaves of China have been almost impervious to the general improvement in the standard of living that China accomplished at the end of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st. China is not the only nation to have this difficulty. Some would argue that America still has it with some of its Native American nations. The great challenge is trying to develop and modernize a culture that does not want to be modernized at the moment but still wants many of the benefits of modernization.
This is a complaint similar to that made by anti-immigrant Americans. France, like most other countries of the world, has never had the large scale immigration of today, nor have they had such a large proportion of the same ethnicity at once—in this case, Muslim North Africans. There were never, before the last decades, enough immigrants of any ethnicity in France to have a choice of maintaining their traditional languages and culture and not learning French or otherwise assimilating. America, in contrast, had large immigrations of different ethnicities, and despite the erroneous beliefs of immigration opponents, these blocs of immigrants have wherever there was sufficient density—usually cities, they maintained their old language and other customs. However, their children and the next generation in almost all cases have abandoned the language and many of the customs of the old country. This was true of the Germans, the Irish, the Italians, the European Jews, the Russian Jews, the Scandinavians’, and the Hispanics with their different cultures.
