“AMERICA” AND “AMERICANS”

Abstract

1 2 5 R ‘‘ A M E R I C A ’’ A N D ‘‘ A M E R I C A N S ’’ S A M U E L F L A G G B E M I S Vol. 57, no. 3, March 1968 ‘‘Greetings to you, America! God bless this land of yours!’’ Such were the first words of Pope Paul VI as he descended at Kennedy International Airport in October 1965. As the Ponti√ mounted the ramp to the returning airplane he turned and said to the crowd: ‘‘God bless America! God bless you all!’’ There seems to be no doubt that he meant the United States of America in the sense, for example, of our popular patriotic hymns: ‘‘God Bless America,’’ and ‘‘America the Beautiful,’’ or ‘‘Make America Beautiful,’’ as our new postage stamps say. Elsewhere in his preachments before the Assembly of the United Nations in New York, Paul VI was careful to use America and Americans in the hemispheric sense, speaking of ‘‘the Continent ’’ as the whole New World of both North America and South America and the Isthmus between them and the islands nearest to them. This designation is the current usage of the Organization of American States. The distinction reflects a problem which has disturbed political amenities in inter-American relationships. Should we citizens of the United States of America call our country America and ourselves Americans? 1 2 6 B E M I S Y Various explanations for the origin of the name America have been put forth, philological and historical, some of them most ingenious. The one which historians most commonly accept today is what we learned in our schoolbooks: that a young German geographer at the college of St. Dié, in Lorraine, Martin Waldseem üller, in his famous Cosmography and Map of 1507, labeled the newly discovered continent after the Florentine mariner Amerige or Amerigo (Latin, Americus) Vespucci, ‘‘since Americus discovered it.’’ It is not certain that Vespucci ever commanded any of the several voyages (1499–1503) that he made under Spanish and Portuguese flags respectively, and which he described in his widely published letters that came to Waldseemüller’s hand. Amerigo Vespucci never presumed to name the new continent after himself, but he seems not to have objected. At any rate, the euphony of the name America, written with a Latin feminine ending in analogy to Europa, Asia, and Africa, and the rapid proliferation of maps in Germany soon fixed the terminology rightly or wrongly, in the non-Iberian parts of Europe and in England. Columbus himself, of course, and his biographer son Ferdinando, did not know the word America or Americans. Notwithstanding the activity of the German press, notes the learned Edward Gaylord Bourne, ‘‘the name America made little headway in the Spanish peninsula.’’ Early Spanish historians and writers such as Oviedo, Herrera, and Peter Martyr eschewed it. So did Las Casas, except to denounce its propriety. They referred to the Indies, the West Indies, or ‘‘another world’’ (otro mundo), as the mainland of South America seemed to Columbus: a new world (novus mundus). Later, as Spain extended her empire, they began to speak of Hispaniola, Cuba, New Spain, Mexico, Peru, etc., and the Portuguese colonial realm of Brazil. The aboriginal inhabitants they consistently called Indians. The first Spanish literato that I have found using the word America was none other than Shakespeare’s great contemporary, Miguel de Cervantes, who mentions it (Don Quijote Pt. I, Ch. 48), like Waldseemüller, as one of the four parts of the world: Europa, Asia, Africa, America. As late as 1793 the Spanish historian Mu- ñoz, whom Bourne extolls as the author of ‘‘the first really critical history according to modern ideas,’’ saw fit to entitle his work ‘‘ A M E R I C A ’’ A N D ‘‘ A M E R I C A N S ’’ 1 2 7 R Historia del Nuevo Mundo. But the same year appeared the first Spanish map to contain the name America: Lopez’s Atlas. It is interesting, in contrast to usage in Spain, to note how quickly the name America crossed the Channel of England. An English poetaster, John Rastell...