Framing nineteenth-century American realism within William Dean Howells’s dialect movement, which encouraged authors from Mark Twain to Stephen Crane to capture characteristic accents from every corner of the country, this chapter argues that America’s “native-born” speech came to serve as the correlative of “native-born” citizenship on the page. As a literary solution to a legal battle over American belonging, the dialect movement produced not only a distinctively American national canon but also facilitated the rise of the modern nation-state, demonstrating how diverse ethnic populations could be made to speak with one voice: the voice of the people. Yet as illustrated by a close reading of Howells’s 1890 A Hazard of New Fortunes, there remained one kind of accent that could never be assimilated: the voice of a poor man. As a closely-inspired allegory of the 1886 Haymarket Affair scapegoating German socialist August Spies, Hazard demonstrates that a poor man, speaking as a poor man on behalf of the principles of international socialism, could never be made to count as a good American because the engine of the nation-state relies on the difference between rich and poor to make it run.