# Franklin D. Roosevelt — "descended from immigrants and revolutionists" > [!quote] "Remember always that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists." > — Franklin D. Roosevelt, Remarks to the Daughters of the [[American Revolution]], Washington, D.C., April 21, 1938 ## Context Delivered, without notes, to 4,000 members of the Daughters of the American Revolution — an audience that prided itself on bloodline descent from the founding generation. FDR, himself of Mayflower and Revolutionary stock, used that very pedigree to puncture nativist exclusivity: even the most "native" Americans in the room were, at bottom, the children of immigrants. (The widely repeated version in which he opens "My fellow immigrants" is apocryphal; the authenticated line is the one above.) ## Why this matters The rhetorical move at the heart of the whole tradition: turning founding-stock pride into an argument *for* immigration rather than against it. Spoken in 1938, against the backdrop of rising European fascism and tightening U.S. quotas, it reframes American identity as inherently immigrant and revolutionary — not a fixed ethnic inheritance to be defended. It is the direct ancestor of the Kennedy-to-Obama "nation of immigrants" line, and the precise inversion of the blood-and-soil logic that [[Great Replacement Theory]] would later weaponize. ## Verification - **Primary source:** [The American Presidency Project, Remarks to the Daughters of the American Revolution, April 21, 1938](https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-the-daughters-the-american-revolution-washington-dc) (compiled from contemporaneous Washington Post, New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, and AP reports; the remarks were unscripted). - **Status:** Verbatim from the authenticated reconstruction. The "My fellow immigrants" salutation often attached to this speech is not in the record. ## Related quotes - [[George Washington - bosom of America is open]] — the founding-era statement FDR is, in effect, restating to the founders' descendants. - [[John F. Kennedy - a nation of immigrants]] — the same idea given its enduring brand name two decades later. - Featured in [[Presidents on the Nation of Immigrants]].