One point to remember is that these two speeches were made in times of international turmoil. In 1915, the United States was being faced with the question of whether or not it should join World War I. The writer of the "Hyphenated Americans" speech, Theodore Roosevelt, believed that the United States should join the war. Roosevelt wanted all the different groups in the United States to drop the hyphen in front of their claimed ethnic groups and become what he called "Americans." He stated that there was no room for loyalty to both a mother country and the United States. He used history as an example, stating that some of the Revolutionary War's greatest foreign heroes were listed as Americans in history books, never with hyphens. Roosevelt's desire to see the United States have one common culture was part of a greater attempt to break down hostilities people had between different ethnic and religious groups. This was part of a longer speech in which Roosevelt pushed for military preparedness as well as loyalty to one flag: that of the United States.
In the "Shut the Door" speech given by Senator Ellison Smith in 1924, Smith states that the United States already had accepted enough immigration and argues that it should close its doors. This was during the Red Scare of the 1920s, and many feared anarchist and communist takeover from eastern and southern Europe. Smith argued that the United States should focus on developing its own culture and that it should guard its own resources and employment opportunities for people already living in the country. Congress would go on to pass the National Origins Act, sharply curtailing immigration from southern and eastern Europe at a time when refugees in these countries needed American sanctuary the most. Smith was part of a growing nativist movement in the United States which feared foreign influence and the potential threat it could pose to the national government.
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5080
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