Name-Calling: It's Definitely All-American

Name-Calling: It’s Definitely All-American

By Jack Smith

March 23, 1988 12 AM PT

We citizens of the United States of America have plenty of excuses for calling ourselves Americans, thus arrogating to ourselves the name of two continents.

In raising the question recently, teacher Albert H. Clodius pointed out that some of his Latin American students resent the definitive use of America by our state, ignoring the fact that many other independent republics are just as American.

S. C. M. Weber of Los Gatos argues that “ours is the only country which includes the word America in its official title,” and that justifies American .

But why were we justified in taking the name of two continents when most other American republics indigenous to those two continents adopted names of local historical significance--i.e., the United States of Mexico, the United States of Brazil?

Most readers agree with me that United Statesians is linguistically impossible; besides, most other American countries are also united states, so there is no distinction in that. Calvin Gabriel of Los Osos suggests that we call ourselves USAmericans, pronounced You Ess Americans. But that does not distinguish us from any other USAmericans.

Architect Whitney R. Smith recalls that Frank Lloyd Wright employed the word Usonia for the U.S.A., giving credit for its invention to the novelist Samuel Butler.

Smith encloses a quotation on the subject from Wright’s “A Testament”: “Samuel Butler pitied us for having no name of our own. The United States did not appear to him a good title for us as a nation, and the word American belonged to us only in common with a dozen or more countries. So he suggested Usonian --roots of the word in the word unity or in union . This seemed to me appropriate. So I have often used this word in reference to our own country or style.”

The fact that the influential Wright failed to endow the word Usonian with currency shows the difficulty of changing custom.

Jim deYong of Irvine observes that we are the only state in North and South America that uses America in our name. “There is no Uruguayan States of America. No Costa Rican Republic of America. No American People’s Republic of Nicaragua. But there is a United States of America. As a result, it seems only fair that we call ourselves Americans. Just as the citizens of Mexico call themselves Mexicans. Just as the citizens of Brazil call themselves Brazilians. And so forth.”

Cecil E. Ramphal of Huntington Beach can’t see any reason for complaints. “I am a foreign-born American from South America and I grew up calling people in the U.S. ‘Americans.’ Everyone in the rest of the world does the same. We never told anyone that they can’t call themselves Americans. So why the big flap?”

Noting the Americas were named for Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci, Julie Spickler of Sherman Oaks wonders why they weren’t called the Vespuccias, as Colombia is named for Christopher Columbus, Bolivia is named for Simon Bolivar, and Rhodesia is named for Cecil Rhodes. Why use Vespucci’s first name?

Probably it was German perversity. The New World was first called America in 1507 by a German cartographer, Martin Waldseemuller, in Vespucci’s honor. Waldseemuller applied the name only to South America, but it caught on, and was extended to North America as well.

“Maybe a mistake was made a long time ago when we got named after Amerigo Vespucci,” wrote Duke Russell. “Maybe we were supposed to be called Vespuccians. Why not the United States of Vespuccia? We’ve been trying to change our national anthem for years to ‘America, the Beautiful.’ Can you imagine Pavarotti introducing our new anthem--’Vespuccia the Beautiful’?

“I know it won’t be easy. These kinds of things never are. All we can do is throw it out there and see what happens--’from sea to shining sea.’ ”

Dan Jenkins of Pacific Palisades raises a melancholy thought. He points out that if the Founding Fathers had had computers, instead of pens, we would never know that Gouverneur Morris changed the first draft of the Preamble to the Constitution from “We the people of the states of New Hampshire, Massachusetts,” and so on, to “We the People of the United States. . . .”

“For then,” Jenkins says, “we would have been left with only that pristine final draft on a floppy disc--nothing else. Think on it.”

That’s something to think about, all right.