Author Question: What did John F. Kennedy mean when he said that America is not merely a nation but a nation of ... (Read 41 times)

jeatrice · **on:** Jul 10, 2018

What did John F. Kennedy mean when he said that America is not merely a nation but a nation of nations? Does Kennedy's conception of America still hold true?

What will be an ideal response?

Question 2

Why do two of the basic principles of democracy, equality and individual liberty, sometimes conflict with each other? How do civil rights laws promote one of these principles while limiting the other? Provide some concrete examples.

How would the Founders of the United States be likely to feel about these issues?

What will be an ideal response?

carolinefletcherr · **Reply #1 on:** Jul 10, 2018

Answer to Question 1

An ideal response will:
1, Acknowledge that the United States has always been a nation of immigrants and that all Americans except Native Americans are descended from immigrants or are immigrants themselves.
2, Suggest that the United States is still in the third of three great waves of immigration and recall that, since the 1960s, immigrants have been especially Hispanic and Asian.
3, Provide relevant statistics regarding present-day immigration: 1 million legal immigrants per year; 500,000 illegal immigrants each year; immigrants constitute roughly 11percent of the nation's population.

Answer to Question 2

An ideal response will:
1, Explain that these two basic principles can conflict when equality, which favors majority rule, leads to a majority of people wanting to deprive a minority of certain rights, thus threatening individual liberty.
2, Describe how civil rights laws, which ensure individual liberties, increase the scope and power of government, which represents limits on individual liberty in the sense that people and institutions must act in certain ways whether they want to or not; for example, restaurant owners must serve all patrons regardless of race, professional schools must admit women, and employers must accommodate people with disabilities and make an effort to hire minority workers.
3, Discuss how the effects of civil rights laws do not conform to the eighteenth-century idea of limited government that the Founders envisioned.
4, Note that although the original Constitution did not guarantee individual rights, the Declaration of Independence referred to all people being created equal and having inalienable rights to which they are equally entitled, and the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution guarantees equal protection of the laws.