Everyone an American

There’s a move afoot to extend honorary citizenship to Anne Frank (report here). The impulse is obviously a benign one, by way of making amends for the US failure to issue timely visas to her and her family.

But might there be a little hubris involved here as well, something of an assumption that she would have been happy to have the status. But as one of her living relatives observed in response to the report, Anne Frank would no more have wanted to become an American citizen “than she would have wanted to become a Cuban citizen.” Unlike the six individuals who have been extended honorary citizenship (Winston Churchill, William Penn and his wife, the Marquis de Lafayette, Mother Theresa, and Raoul Wallenberg — the relevant acts of Congress are collected here), she had no actual connection to the United States (Wallenberg is a stretch on this point, but he did work with US officials in protecting Hungarian Jews). So unbound, one could imagine the costless vehicle of honorary citizenship getting out of hand, in the way of National Catfish Day and the like. Why not appropriate Shakespeare, Aristotle, Gandhi and other greats as honorary citizens? Surely they would have liked to have been American, wouldn’t they?