Minneapolis Journal in the context of "Hyphenated American"

In this context, the term "the hyphen" was a metonymical reference to this kind of ethnicity descriptor, and "dropping the hyphen" referred to full integration into the American identity. Some contemporary critics of this concept, such as Randolph Bourne in his criticism of the Preparedness Movement, accused America's White Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite of hypocrisy by showing the same divided loyalty in pushing for the "Special Relationship" that they refused to tolerate in others. Other contemporaries, like Bishop John Joseph Frederick Otto Zardetti, argued eloquently that there is no contradiction between American patriotism and loyalty to one's ancestral culture, religion, and heritage language. In a 1916 letter to the Minneapolis Journal, one Minnesota German-American suggested that his own people would willingly "abandon the hyphen", but only if "Anglo-Americans" did so first.