_Saturday, July 4, evening. The Roof-Garden of the Settlement
House, showing a beautiful, far-stretching panorama of New York,
with its irregular sky-buildings on the left, and the harbour
with its Statue of Liberty on the right. Everything is wet and
gleaming after rain. Parapet at the back. Elevator on the right.
Entrance from the stairs on the left. In the sky hang heavy
clouds through which thin, golden lines of sunset are just
beginning to labour. DAVID is discovered on a bench, hugging his
violin-case to his breast, gazing moodily at the sky. A muffled
sound of applause comes up from below and continues with varying
intensity through the early part of the scene. Through it comes
the noise of the elevator ascending. MENDEL steps out and hurries
forward_.
MENDEL
Come down, David! Don't you hear them shouting for you?
[_He passes his hand over the wet bench._]
Good heavens! You will get rheumatic fever!
DAVID
Why have you followed me?
MENDEL
Get up--everything is still damp.
DAVID [_Rising, gloomily_]
Yes, there's a damper over everything.
MENDEL
Nonsense--the rain hasn't damped your triumph in the least. In fact, the
more delicate effects wouldn't have gone so well in the open air.
Listen!
DAVID
Let them shout. Who told you I was up here?
MENDEL
Miss Revendal, of course.
DAVID [_Agitated_]
Miss Revendal? How should _she_ know?
MENDEL [_Sullenly_]
She seems to understand your crazy ways.
DAVID [_Passing his hand over his eyes_]
Ah, _you_ never understood me, uncle.... How did she look? Was she pale?
MENDEL
Never mind about Miss Revendal. Pappelmeister wants you--the people
insist on seeing you. Nobody can quiet them.
DAVID
They saw me all through the symphony in my place in the orchestra.
MENDEL
They didn't know you were the composer as well as the first violin. Now
Miss Revendal has told them.
[_Louder applause._]
There! Eleven minutes it has gone on--like for an office-seeker. You
_must_ come and show yourself.
DAVID
I won't--I'm not an office-seeker. Leave me to my misery.
MENDEL
Your misery? With all this glory and greatness opening before you? Wait
till you're _my_ age----
[_Shouts of "QUIXANO!"_]
You hear! What is to be done with them?
DAVID
Send somebody on the platform to remind them this is the interval for
refreshments!
MENDEL
Don't be cynical. You know your dearest wish was to melt these simple
souls with your music. And now----
DAVID
Now I have only made my own stony.
MENDEL
You are right. You are stone all over--ever since you came back home to
us. Turned into a pillar of salt, mother says--like Lot's wife.
DAVID
That was the punishment for looking backward. Ah, uncle, there's more
sense in that old Bible than the Rabbis suspect. Perhaps that is the
secret of our people's paralysis--we are always looking backward.
[_He drops hopelessly into an iron garden-chair behind him._]
MENDEL [_Stopping him before he touches the seat_]
Take care--it's sopping wet. You don't look backward enough.
[_He takes out his handkerchief and begins drying the chair._]
DAVID [_Faintly smiling_]
I thought you wanted the salt to melt.
MENDEL
It _is_ melting a little if you can smile. Do you know, David, I haven't
seen you smile since that _Purim_ afternoon?
DAVID
You haven't worn a false nose since, uncle.
[_He laughs bitterly._]
Ha! Ha! Ha! Fancy masquerading in America because twenty-five centuries
ago the Jews escaped a _pogrom_ in Persia. Two thousand five hundred
years ago! Aren't we uncanny?
[_He drops into the wiped chair._]
MENDEL [_Angrily_]
Better you should leave us altogether than mock at us. I thought it was
your Jewish heart that drove you back home to us; but if you are still
hankering after Miss Revendal----
DAVID [_Pained_]
Uncle!
MENDEL
I'd rather see you marry her than go about like this. You couldn't make
the house any gloomier.
DAVID
Go back to the concert, please. They have quieted down.
MENDEL [_Hesitating_]
And you?
DAVID
Oh, I'm not playing in the popular after-pieces. Pappelmeister guessed
I'd be broken up with the stress of my own symphony--he has violins
enough.
MENDEL
Then you don't want to carry this about.
[_Taking the violin from DAVID'S arms._]
DAVID [_Clinging to it_]
Don't rob me of my music--it's all I have.
MENDEL
You'll spoil it in the wet. I'll take it home.
DAVID
No----
[_He suddenly catches sight of two figures entering from the
left--FRAU QUIXANO and KATHLEEN clad in their best, and wearing
tiny American flags in honour of Independence Day. KATHLEEN
escorts the old lady, with the air of a guardian angel, on her
slow, tottering course toward DAVID. FRAU QUIXANO is puffing and
panting after the many stairs. DAVID jumps up in surprise,
releases the violin-case to MENDEL._]
They at my symphony!
MENDEL
Mother _would_ come--even though, being _Shabbos_, she had to walk.
DAVID
But wasn't she shocked at my playing on the Sabbath?
MENDEL
No--that's the curious part of it. She said that even as a boy you
played your fiddle on _Shabbos_, and that if the Lord has stood it all
these years, He must consider you an exception.
DAVID
You see! She's more sensible than you thought. I daresay whatever I
were to do she'd consider me an exception.
MENDEL [_In sullen acquiescence_]
I suppose geniuses _are_.
KATHLEEN [_Reaching them; panting with admiration and breathlessness_]
Oh, Mr. David! it was like midnight mass! But the misthress was ashleep.
DAVID
Asleep!
[_Laughs half-merrily, half-sadly._]
Ha! Ha! Ha!
FRAU QUIXANO [_Panting and laughing in response_]
He! He! He! _Dovidel lacht widder._ He! He! He!
[_She touches his arm affectionately, but feeling his wet coat,
utters a cry of horror._]
_Du bist nass!_
DAVID
_Es ist gor nicht_, Granny--my clothes are thick.
[_She fusses over him, wiping him down with her gloved hand._]
MENDEL
But what brought you up here, Kathleen?
KATHLEEN
Sure, not the elevator. The misthress said 'twould be breaking the
_Shabbos_ to ride up in it.
DAVID [_Uneasily_]
But did---did Miss Revendal send you up?
KATHLEEN
And who else should be axin' the misthress if she wasn't proud of Mr.
David? Faith, she's a sweet lady.
MENDEL [_Impatiently_]
Don't chatter, Kathleen.
KATHLEEN
But, Mr. Quixano----!
DAVID [_Sweetly_]
Please take your mistress down again--don't let her walk.
KATHLEEN
But _Shabbos_ isn't out yet!
MENDEL
Chattering again!
DAVID [_Gently_]
There's no harm, Kathleen, in going _down_ in the elevator.
KATHLEEN
Troth, I'll egshplain to her that droppin' down isn't ridin'.
DAVID [_Smiling_]
Yes, tell her dropping down is natural--not _work_, like flying up.
[_Kathleen begins to move toward the stairs, explaining to FRAU
QUIXANO._]
And, Kathleen! You'll get her some refreshments.
KATHLEEN [_Turns, glaring_]
Refrishments, is it? Give her refrishments where they mix the mate with
the butther plates! Oh, Mr. David!
[_She moves off toward the stairs in reproachful sorrow._]
MENDEL [_Smiling_]
I'll get her some coffee.
DAVID [_Smiling_]
Yes, that'll keep her awake. Besides, Pappelmeister was so sure the
people wouldn't understand me, he's relaxing them on Gounod and Rossini.
MENDEL
Pappelmeister's idea of relaxation! _I_ should have given them comic
opera.
[_With sudden call to KATHLEEN, who with her mistress is at the
wrong exit._]
Kathleen! The elevator's _this_ side!
KATHLEEN [_Turning_]
What way can that be, when I came up _this_ side?
MENDEL
You chatter too much.
[_FRAU QUIXANO, not understanding, exit._]
Come this way. Can't you see the elevator?
KATHLEEN [_Perceives FRAU QUIXANO has gone, calls after her in
Irish-sounding Yiddish_]
_Wu geht Ihr_, bedad?...
[_Impatiently_]
Houly Moses, _komm' zurick_!
[_Exit anxiously, re-enter with FRAU QUIXANO._]
Begorra, we Jews never know our way.
[_MENDEL, carrying the violin, escorts his mother and KATHLEEN to
the elevator. When they are near it, it stops with a thud, and
PAPPELMEISTER springs out, his umbrella up, meeting them face to
face. He looks happy and beaming over DAVID'S triumph._]
PAPPELMEISTER [_In loud, joyous voice_]
_Nun, Frau Quixano, was sagen Sie?_ Vat you tink of your David?
FRAU QUIXANO
_Dovid? Er ist meshuggah._
[_She taps her forehead._]
PAPPELMEISTER [_Puzzled, to MENDEL_]
_Meshuggah!_ Vat means _meshuggah_? Crazy?
MENDEL [_Half-smiling_]
You've struck it. She says David doesn't know enough to go in out of the
rain.
[_General laughter._]
DAVID [_Rising_]
But it's stopped raining, Herr Pappelmeister. You don't want your
umbrella.
[_General laughter._]
PAPPELMEISTER
_So._
[_Shuts it down._]
MENDEL
_Herein, Mutter._
[_He pushes FRAU QUIXANO'S somewhat shrinking form into the
elevator. KATHLEEN follows, then MENDEL._]
Herr Pappelmeister, we are all your grateful servants.
[_PAPPELMEISTER bows; the gates close, the elevator descends._]
DAVID
And you won't think _me_ ungrateful for running away--you know my thanks
are too deep to be spoken.
PAPPELMEISTER
And zo are my congratulations!
DAVID
Then, don't speak them, please.
PAPPELMEISTER
But you _must_ come and speak to all de people in America who
undershtand music.
DAVID [_Half-smiling_]
To your four connoisseurs?
[_Seriously_]
Oh, please! I really could not meet strangers, especially musical
vampires.
PAPPELMEISTER [_Half-startled, half-angry_]
Vampires? Oh, come!
DAVID
Voluptuaries, then--rich, idle æsthetes to whom art and life have no
connection, parasites who suck our music----
PAPPELMEISTER [_Laughs good-naturedly_]
Ha! Ha! Ha! Vait till you hear vat dey say.
DAVID
I will wait as long as you like.
PAPPELMEISTER
Den I like to tell you now.
[_He roars with mischievous laughter._]
Ha! Ha! Ha! De first vampire says it is a great vork, but poorly
performed.
DAVID [_Indignant_]
Oh!
PAPPELMEISTER
De second vampire says it is a poor vork, but greatly performed.
DAVID [_Disappointed_]
Oh!
PAPPELMEISTER
De dird vampire says it is a great vork greatly performed.
DAVID [_Complacently_]
Ah!
PAPPELMEISTER
And de fourz vampire says it is a poor vork poorly performed.
DAVID [_Angry and disappointed_]
Oh!
[_Then smiling_]
You see you _have_ to go by the people after all.
PAPPELMEISTER [_Shakes head, smiling_]
_Nein._ Ven critics disagree--I agree mit mineself. Ha! Ha! Ha!
[_He slaps DAVID on the back._]
A great vork dat vill be even better performed next time! Ha! Ha! Ha!
Ten dousand congratulations.
[_He seizes DAVID'S hand and grips it heartily._]
DAVID
Don't! You hurt me.
PAPPELMEISTER [_Dropping DAVID'S hand,--misunderstanding_]
Pardon! I forgot your vound.
DAVID
No--no--what does my wound matter? That never stung half so much as
these clappings and congratulations.
PAPPELMEISTER [_Puzzled but solicitous_]
I knew your nerves vould be all shnapping like fiddle-shtrings. Oh, you
cheniuses!
[_Smiling._]
You like neider de clappings nor de criticisms,--_was_?
DAVID
They are equally--irrelevant. One has to wrestle with one's own art,
one's own soul, _alone_!
PAPPELMEISTER [_Patting him soothingly_]
I am glad I did not let you blay in Part Two.
DAVID
Dear Herr Pappelmeister! Don't think I don't appreciate all your
kindnesses--you are almost a father to me.
PAPPELMEISTER
And you disobey me like a son. Ha! Ha! Ha! Vell, I vill make your
excuses to de--vampires. Ha! Ha! _Also_, David.
[_He lays his hand again affectionately on DAVID'S right
shoulder._]
_Lebe wohl!_ I must go down to my popular classics.
[_Gloomily_]
Truly a going down! _Was?_
DAVID [_Smiling_]
Oh, it isn't such a descent as all that. Uncle said you ought to have
given them comic opera.
PAPPELMEISTER [_Shuddering convulsively_]
Comic opera.... Ouf!
[_He goes toward the elevator and rings the bell. Then he turns
to DAVID._]
Vat vas dat vord, David?
DAVID
What word?
PAPPELMEISTER [_Groping for it_]
_Mega--megasshu_....
DAVID [_Puzzled_]
_Megasshu?_
[_The elevator comes up; the gates open._]
PAPPELMEISTER
_Megusshah!_ You know.
[_He taps his forehead with his umbrella._]
DAVID
Ah, _meshuggah_!
PAPPELMEISTER [_Joyously_]
_Ja, meshuggah!_
[_He gives a great roar of laughter._]
Ha! Ha! Ha!
[_He waves umbrella at DAVID._]
Well, don't be ... _meshuggah_.
[_He steps into the elevator._]
Ha! Ha! Ha!
[_The gates close, and it descends with his laughter._]
DAVID [_After a pause_]
Perhaps I _am_ ... _meshuggah_.
[_He walks up and down moodily, approaches the parapet at back._]
Dropping down is indeed natural.
[_He looks over._]
How it tugs and drags at one!
[_He moves back resolutely and shakes his head._]
That would be even a greater descent than Pappelmeister's to comic
opera. One _must_ fly upward--somehow.
[_He drops on the chair that MENDEL dried. A faint music steals
up and makes an accompaniment to all the rest of the scene._]
Ah! the popular classics!
[_His head sinks on a little table. The elevator comes up again,
but he does not raise his head. VERA, pale and sad, steps out and
walks gently over to him; stands looking at him with maternal
pity; then decides not to disturb him and is stealing away when
suddenly he looks up and perceives her and springs to his feet
with a dazed glad cry._]
Vera!
VERA [_Turns, speaks with grave dignity_]
Miss Andrews has charged me to convey to you the heart-felt thanks and
congratulations of the Settlement.
DAVID [_Frozen_]
Miss Andrews is very kind.... I trust you are well.
VERA
Thank you, Mr. Quixano. Very well and very busy. So you'll excuse me.
[_She turns to go._]
DAVID
Certainly.... How are your folks?
VERA [_Turns her head_]
They are gone back to Russia. And yours?
DAVID
You just saw them all.
VERA [_Confused_]
Yes--yes--of course--I forgot! Good-bye, Mr. Quixano.
DAVID
Good-bye, Miss Revendal.
[_He drops back on the chair. VERA walks to the elevator, then
just before ringing turns again._]
VERA
I shouldn't advise you to sit here in the damp.
DAVID
My uncle dried the chair.
[_Bitterly_]
Curious how every one is concerned about my body and no one about my
soul.
VERA
Because your soul is so much stronger than your body. Why, think! It has
just lifted a thousand people far higher than this roof-garden.
DAVID
Please don't you congratulate me, too! That would be too ironical.
VERA [_Agitated, coming nearer_]
Irony, Mr. Quixano? Please, please, do not imagine there is any irony in
my congratulations.
DAVID
The irony is in all the congratulations. How can I endure them when I
know what a terrible failure I have made!
VERA
Failure! Because the critics are all divided? That is the surest proof
of success. You have produced something real and new.
DAVID
I am not thinking of Pappelmeister's connoisseurs--_I_ am the only
connoisseur, the only one who knows. And every bar of my music cried
"Failure! Failure!" It shrieked from the violins, blared from the
trombones, thundered from the drums. It was written on all the
faces----
VERA [_Vehemently, coming still nearer_]
Oh, no! no! I watched the faces--those faces of toil and sorrow, those
faces from many lands. They were fired by your vision of their coming
brotherhood, lulled by your dream of their land of rest. And I could see
that you were right in speaking to the people. In some strange,
beautiful, way the inner meaning of your music stole into all those
simple souls----
DAVID [_Springing up_]
And _my_ soul? What of _my_ soul? False to its own music, its own
mission, its own dream. That is what I mean by failure, Vera. I preached
of God's Crucible, this great new continent that could melt up all
race-differences and vendettas, that could purge and re-create, and God
tried me with his supremest test. He gave me a heritage from the Old
World, hate and vengeance and blood, and said, "Cast it all into my
Crucible." And I said, "Even thy Crucible cannot melt this hate, cannot
drink up this blood." And so I sat crooning over the dead past, gloating
over the old blood-stains--I, the apostle of America, the prophet of the
God of our children. Oh--how my music mocked me! And you--so fearless,
so high above fate--how you must despise me!
VERA
I? Ah no!
DAVID
You must. You do. Your words still sting. Were it seven seas between
us, you said, our love must cross them. And I--I who had prated of seven
seas----
VERA
Not seas of blood--I spoke selfishly, thoughtlessly. I had not realised
that crimson flood. Now I see it day and night. O God!
[_She shudders and covers her eyes._]
DAVID
There lies my failure--to have brought it to your eyes, instead of
blotting it from my own.
VERA
No man could have blotted it out.
DAVID
Yes--by faith in the Crucible. From the blood of battlefields spring
daisies and buttercups. In the divine chemistry the very garbage turns
to roses. But in the supreme moment my faith was found wanting. You came
to me--and I thrust you away.
VERA
I ought not to have come to you.... I ought not to have come to you
to-day. We must not meet again.
DAVID
Ah, you cannot forgive me!
VERA
Forgive? It is I that should go down on my knees for my father's sin.
[_She is half-sinking to her knees. He stops her by a gesture and
a cry._]
DAVID
No! The sins of the fathers shall not be visited on the children.
VERA
My brain follows you, but not my heart. It is heavy with the sense of
unpaid debts--debts that can only cry for forgiveness.
DAVID
You owe me nothing----
VERA
But my father, my people, my country....
[_She breaks down. Recovers herself._]
My only consolation is, you need nothing.
DAVID [_Dazed_]
I--need--nothing?
VERA
Nothing but your music ... your dreams.
DAVID
And your love? Do I not need that?
VERA [_Shaking her head sadly_]
No.
DAVID
You say that because I have forfeited it.
VERA
It is my only consolation, I tell you, that you do not need me. In our
happiest moments a suspicion of this truth used to lacerate me. But now
it is my one comfort in the doom that divides us. See how you stand up
here above the world, alone and self-sufficient. No woman could ever
have more than the second place in your life.
DAVID
But you have the _first_ place, Vera!
VERA [_Shakes her head again_]
No--I no longer even desire it. I have gotten over that womanly
weakness.
DAVID
You torture me. What do you mean?
VERA
What can be simpler? I used to be jealous of your music, your prophetic
visions. I wanted to come first--before them all! Now, dear David, I
only pray that they may fill your life to the brim.
DAVID
But they cannot.
VERA
They will--have faith in yourself, in your mission--good-bye.
DAVID [_Dazed_]
You love me and you leave me?
VERA
What else can I do? Shall the shadow of Kishineff hang over all your
years to come? Shall I kiss you and leave blood upon your lips, cling to
you and be pushed away by all those cold, dead hands?
DAVID [_Taking both her hands_]
Yes, cling to me, despite them all, cling to me till all these ghosts
are exorcised, cling to me till our love triumphs over death. Kiss me,
kiss me now.
VERA [_Resisting, drawing back_]
I dare not! It will make you remember.
DAVID
It will make me forget. Kiss me.
[_There is a pause of hesitation, filled up by the Cathedral
music from "Faust" surging up softly from below._]
VERA [_Slowly_]
I will kiss you as we Russians kiss at Easter--the three kisses of
peace.
[_She kisses him three times on the mouth as in ritual
solemnity._]
DAVID [_Very calmly_]
Easter was the date of the massacre--see! I am at peace.
VERA
God grant it endure!
[_They stand quietly hand in hand._]
Look! How beautiful the sunset is after the storm!
[_DAVID turns. The sunset, which has begun to grow beautiful just
after VERA'S entrance, has now reached its most magnificent
moment; below there are narrow lines of saffron and pale gold,
but above the whole sky is one glory of burning flame._]
DAVID [_Prophetically exalted by the spectacle_]
It is the fires of God round His Crucible.
[_He drops her hand and points downward._]
There she lies, the great Melting Pot--listen! Can't you hear the
roaring and the bubbling? There gapes her mouth
[_He points east_]
--the harbour where a thousand mammoth feeders come from the ends of the
world to pour in their human freight. Ah, what a stirring and a
seething! Celt and Latin, Slav and Teuton, Greek and Syrian,--black and
yellow----
VERA [_Softly, nestling to him_]
Jew and Gentile----
DAVID
Yes, East and West, and North and South, the palm and the pine, the
pole and the equator, the crescent and the cross--how the great
Alchemist melts and fuses them with his purging flame! Here shall they
all unite to build the Republic of Man and the Kingdom of God. Ah, Vera,
what is the glory of Rome and Jerusalem where all nations and races come
to worship and look back, compared with the glory of America, where all
races and nations come to labour and look forward!
[_He raises his hands in benediction over the shining city._]
Peace, peace, to all ye unborn millions, fated to fill this giant
continent--the God of our _children_ give you Peace.
[_An instant's solemn pause. The sunset is swiftly fading, and
the vast panorama is suffused with a more restful twilight, to
which the many-gleaming lights of the town add the tender poetry
of the night. Far back, like a lonely, guiding star, twinkles
over the darkening water the torch of the Statue of Liberty. From
below comes up the softened sound of voices and instruments
joining in "My Country, 'tis of Thee." The curtain falls
slowly._]
APPENDIX A
THE MELTING POT IN ACTION
ALIENS ADMITTED TO THE UNITED STATES IN THE YEAR ENDED JUNE 30TH, 1913
African (black) 9,734
Armenian 9,554
Bohemian and Moravian 11,852
Bulgarian, Servian, Montenegrin 10,083
Chinese 3,487
Croatian and Slavonian 44,754
Cuban 6,121
Dalmatian, Bosnian, Herzegovinian 4,775
Dutch and Flemish 18,746
East Indian 233
English 100,062
Finnish 14,920
French 26,509
German 101,764
Greek 40,933
Hebrew 105,826
Irish 48,103
Italian (north) 54,171
Italian (south) 264,348
Japanese 11,672
Korean 74
Lithuanian 25,529
Magyar 33,561
Mexican 15,495
Pacific Islander 27
Polish 185,207
Portuguese 14,631
Roumanian 14,780
Russian 58,380
Ruthenian (Russniak) 39,405
Scandinavian 51,650
Scotch 31,434
Slovak 29,094
Spanish 15,017
Spanish-American 3,409
Syrian 10,019
Turkish 2,132
Welsh 3,922
West Indian (except Cuban) 2,302
Other peoples 3,512
--------
Total 1,427,227
APPENDIX B
THE POGROM
(I) A RUSSIAN ON ITS REASONS
[From _The Nation_, November 15, 1913]
It is now over thirty years since the crew of the sinking ship
of Russian absolutism first tried this unworthy weapon to save
their failing cause. This was when Plehve organised an anti-Semitic
agitation and Jewish pogroms in 1883 in South Russia,
where the Jews formed almost the only merchant class in the
villages, and where the ignorant peasants, together with some
crafty Russian tradesmen, had a natural grudge against them.
The result was that the prevailing discontent of the masses
was diverted against the Jews. A large public meeting of
protest was organised at that time in the London Mansion
House, the Lord Mayor taking the chair. English public
opinion rightly appreciated the value of this criminal method
of using Jews as scapegoats for political purposes. Now we see
merely a further, and let us hope a final, development of the
same tactics. They have been used on many occasions since
1883. One of the largest Jewish pogroms of the latest series
in Kishineff in 1903 has been clearly traced to the same experienced
hand of Plehve, when the passive attitude of the local
administration and the military was explained by the presence
in the town of a mysterious colonel of the Imperial Gendarmerie
who arrived with secret orders and a large supply of pogrom
literature from St. Petersburg, and who organised the scum of
the town population for the purpose of looting and killing Jews.
The repulsive stories of further pogroms all over the country
immediately after the issue of the constitutional manifesto of
October 17, 1905, are fresh in the memory of the civilised world.
At that time anti-Semitic doctrine was openly preached, not
only against Jews, but against the whole constitutional and
revolutionary upheaval. Pogroms against both were organised
under the same pretext of saving the Tsar, the orthodoxy, and
the Fatherland. Local police and military officials had secret
orders to abstain from interference with the looting and murdering
of Jews or "their hirelings." Processions of peaceful
citizens and children were trampled down by the Cossack
horses, and the Cossacks received formal thanks from high
quarters for their excellent exploits....
N. W. TCHAYKOVSKY.
(II) A NURSE ON ITS RESULTS
[From _Public Health_, Nurses' Quarterly, Cleveland, Ohio, October 1913]
I was a Red Cross nurse on the battlefield.
The words of the chief doctor of the Jewish Hospital of Odessa still
ring in my ears. When the telephone message came, he said, "Moldvanko is
running in blood; send nurses and doctors." This meant that the Pogrom
(massacre) was going on.
Dr. P---- came into the wards with these words: "Sisters, there is no
time for weeping. Those who have no one dependent upon them, come. Put
on your white surgical gowns, and the red cross. Make ready to go on the
battlefield at once. God knows how many of our sisters and brothers are
already killed." Tears were just running down his cheeks as he spoke. In
a minute twelve nurses and eight doctors had volunteered. There was one
Red Cross nurse who was in bed waiting to be operated on. She got up and
made ready too. Nobody could keep her from going with us. "Where my
sisters and brothers fall, there shall I fall," she said, and with these
words, jumped into the ambulance and went on to the City Hospital with
us. There they had better equipment, and they sent out three times as
many nurses as the Jewish Hospital. At the City Hospital they hung
silver crosses about our necks. We wore the silver crosses so that we
would not be recognised as Jewish by the Holiganes (Hooligans).
Then we went to Molorosiskia Street in the Moldvanko (slums). We could
not see, for the feathers were flying like snow. The blood was already
up to our ankles on the pavement and in the yards. The uproar was
deafening but we could hear the Holiganes' fierce cries of "Hooray, kill
the Jews," on all sides. It was enough to hear such words. They could
turn your hair grey, but we went on. We had no time to think. All our
thoughts were to pick up wounded ones, and to try to rescue some
uninjured ones. We succeeded in rescuing some uninjured who were in
hiding. We put bandages on them to make it appear that they were
wounded. We put them in the ambulance and carried them to the hospital,
too. So at the Jewish Hospital we had five thousand injured and seven
thousand uninjured to feed and protect for two weeks. Some were left
without homes, without clothes, and children were even without parents.
My dear reader, I want to tell you one thing before I describe the
scenes of the massacre any further; do not think that you are reading a
story which could not happen! No, I want you to know that everything you
read is just exactly as it was. My hair is a little grey, but I am
surprised it is not quite white after what I witnessed.
The procession of the Pogrom was led by about ten Catholic (Greek)
Sisters with about forty or fifty of their school children. They carried
ikons or pictures of Jesus and sang "God Save the Tsar." They were
followed by a crowd containing hundreds of men and women murderers
yelling "Bey Zhida," which means "Kill the Jews." With these words they
ran into the yards where there were fifty or a hundred tenants. They
rushed in like tigers. Soon they began to throw children out of the
windows of the second, third, and fourth stories. They would take a
poor, innocent six-months-old baby, who could not possibly have done any
harm in this world and throw it down on to the pavement. You can
imagine it could not live after it struck the ground, but this did not
satisfy the stony-hearted murderers. They then rushed up to the child,
seized it and broke its little arm and leg bones into three or four
pieces, then wrung its neck too. They laughed and yelled, so carried
away with pleasure at their successful work.
I do wish a few Americans could have been there to see, and they would
know what America is, and what it means to live in the United States. It
was not enough for them to open up a woman's abdomen and take out the
child which she carried, but they took time to stuff the abdomen with
straw and fill it up. Can you imagine human beings able to do such
things? I do not think anybody could, because I could not imagine it
myself when a few years before I read the news of the massacre in
Kishineff, but now I have seen it with my own eyes. It was not enough
for them to cut out an old man's tongue and cut off his nose, but they
drove nails into the eyes also. You wonder how they had enough time to
carry away everything of value--money, gold, silver, jewels--and still
be able to do so much fancy killing, but oh, my friends, all the time
for three days and three nights was theirs.
The last day and night it poured down rain, and you would think that
might stop them, but no, they worked just as hard as ever. We could wear
shoes no longer. Our feet were swollen, so we wore rubbers over our
stockings, and in this way worked until some power was able to stop
these horrors. They not only killed, but they had time to abuse young
girls of twelve and fourteen years of age, who died immediately after
being operated upon.
I remember what happened to my own class-mates. They were two who came
from a small town to Odessa to become midwives. These girls ran to the
school to hide themselves as it was a government school, and they knew
the Holiganes would not dare to come in there. But the dean of the
school had ordered they should not be admitted, because they were
Jewish, as if they had different blood running in their veins. So when
they came, the watchman refused to open the doors, according to his
instructions. The crowd of Holiganes found them outside the doors of the
hospital. They abused them right there in the middle of the street. One
was eighteen years old and the other was twenty. One died after the
operation and the other went insane from shame.
Some people ask why the Jews did not leave everything and go away. But
how could they go and where could they go? The murderers were scattered
throughout the Jewish quarters. All they could do was hide where they
were in the cellars and garrets. The Holiganes searched them out and
killed them where they were hidden. Others may ask, why did they not
resist the murderers with their knives and pistols? The grown men
organised by the second day. They were helped by the Vigilantes, too,
who brought them arms. The Vigilantes were composed of students at the
University and high-school boys, and also the strongest man from each
Jewish family. There were a good many Gentiles among the students who
belonged to the Vigilantes because they wanted justice. So on the second
day the Vigilantes stood before the doors and gave resistance to the
murderers. Some will ask where were the soldiers and the police? They
were sent to protect, but on arriving, joined in with the murderers.
However, the police put disguises on over their uniforms. Later, when
they were brought to the hospital with other wounded, we found their
uniforms underneath their disguises.
When the Vigilantes took their stations, the scene was like a
battlefield. Bullets were flying from both sides of the Red Cross
carriages. We expected to be killed any minute, but notwithstanding, we
rushed wherever there were shots heard in order to carry away the
wounded. Whenever we arrived we shouted "Red Cross, Red Cross," in order
to help make them realise we were not Vigilantes. Then they would stop
and let us pick up the wounded. They did this on account of their own
wounded.
The Vigilantes could not stop the butchery entirely because they were
not strong enough in numbers. On the fourth day, the Jewish people of
Odessa, through Dr. P----, succeeded in communicating to the Mayor of a
different State. Soldiers from outside, strangers to the murderers, came
in and took charge of the city. The city was put under martial law until
order could be restored.
On the fifth day the doctors and nurses were called to the cemetery,
where there were four hundred unidentified dead. Their friends and
relatives who came to search for them were crazed and hysterical and
needed our attention. Wives came to look for husbands, parents hunting
children, a mother for her only son, and so on. It took eight days to
identify the bodies and by that time four hundred of the wounded had
died, and so we had eight hundred to bury. If you visit Odessa, you will
be shown two long graves, about one hundred feet long, beside the Jewish
Cemetery. There lie the victims of the massacre. Among them are Gentile
Vigilantes whose parents asked that they be buried with the Jews....
Another case I knew was that of a married man. He left his wife, who was
pregnant, and three children, to go on a business trip. When he got back
the massacre had occurred. His home was in ruins, his family gone. He
went to the hospital, then to the cemetery. There he found his wife with
her abdomen stuffed with straw, and his three children dead. It simply
broke his heart, and he lost his mind. But he was harmless, and was to
be seen wandering about the hospital as though in search of some one,
and daily he grew more thin and suffering.
This story is told in the hope that Americans will appreciate the safety
and freedom in which they live and that they will help others to gain
that freedom.
APPENDIX C
THE STORY OF DANIEL MELSA
Another example of Nature aping Art is afforded by the romantic story of
Daniel Melsa, a young Russo-Jewish violinist who has carried audiences
by storm in Berlin, Paris and London, and who had arranged to go to
America last November. The following extract from an interview in the
_Jewish Chronicle_ of January 24, 1913, shows the curious coincidence
between his beginnings and David Quixano's:
"Melsa is not yet twenty years of age, but he looks somewhat older. He
is of slight build and has a sad expression, which increased to almost a
painful degree when recounting some of his past experiences. He seems
singularly devoid of any affectation, while modesty is obviously the
keynote of his nature.
"After some persuasion, Melsa put aside his reticence, and, complying
with the request, outlined briefly his career, the early part of which,
he said, was overshadowed by a great tragedy. He was born in Warsaw,
and, at the age of three, his parents moved to Lodz, where shortly after
a private tutor was engaged for him.
"'Although I exhibited a passion for music quite early, I did not
receive any lessons on the subject till my seventh birthday, but before
that my father obtained a cheap violin for me upon which I was soon able
to play simple melodies by ear.'
"By chance a well-known professor of the town heard him play, and so
impressed was he with the talent exhibited by the boy that he advised
the father to have him educated. Acting upon this advice, as far as
limited means allowed, tutors were engaged, and so much progress did he
make that at the age of nine he was admitted to the local Conservatorium
of Professor Grudzinski, where he remained two years. It was at the age
of eleven that a great calamity overtook the family, his father and
sister falling victims to the pogroms.
"Melsa's story runs as follows:
"'It was in June of 1905, at the time of the pogroms, when one afternoon
my father, accompanied by my little sister, ventured out into the
street, from which they never returned. They were both killed,' he added
sadly, 'by Cossacks. A week later I found my sister in a Christian
churchyard riddled with bullets, but I have not been able to trace the
remains of my father, who must have been buried in some out-of-the-way
place. During this awful period my mother and myself lived in imminent
danger of our lives, and it was only the recollection of my playing that
saved us also falling a prey to the vodka-besodden Cossacks.'"
APPENDIX D
BEILIS AND AMERICA
The close relation in Jewish thought between Russo-Jewish persecution
and America as the land of escape from it is well illustrated by the
recent remarks of the _Jewish Chronicle_ on the future of the victim of
the Blood-Ritual Prosecution in Kieff. "So long as Beilis continues to
live in Russia, his life is unsafe. The Black Hundreds, he himself says,
have solemnly decided on his death, and we have seen, in the not distant
past, that they can carry out diabolical plots of this description with
complete immunity.... He would gladly go to America, provided he was
sure of a living. The condition should not be difficult to fulfil, and
if this victim of a barbarous _régime_--we cannot say latest victim,
for, as we write, comes the news of an expulsion order against 1200
Jewish students of Kieff--should find a home and place under the
sheltering wing of freedom, it would be a fitting ending to a painful
chapter in our Jewish history."
That it is the natural ending even the Jew-baiting Russian organ, the
_Novoe Vremya_, indirectly testifies, for it has published a sneering
cartoon representing a number of Jews crowded on the Statue of Liberty
to welcome the arrival of Beilis. One wonders that the Russian censor
should have permitted the masses to become aware that Liberty exists on
earth, if only in the form of a statue.
APPENDIX E
THE ALIEN IN THE MELTING POT
Mr. Frederick J. Haskin has recently published in the _Chicago Daily
News_ the following graphic summary of what immigrants have done and do
for the United States:
I am the immigrant.
Since the dawn of creation my restless feet have beaten new paths across
the earth.
My uneasy bark has tossed on all seas.
My wanderlust was born of the craving for more liberty and a better wage
for the sweat of my face.
I looked towards the United States with eyes kindled by the fire of
ambition and heart quickened with new-born hope.
I approached its gates with great expectation.
I entered in with fine hopes.
I have shouldered my burden as the American man of all work.
I contribute eighty-five per cent. of all the labour in the slaughtering
and meat-packing industries.
I do seven-tenths of the bituminous coal mining.
I do seventy-eight per cent. of all the work in the woollen mills.
I contribute nine-tenths of all the labour in the cotton mills.
I make nine-twentieths of all the clothing.
I manufacture more than half the shoes.
I build four-fifths of all the furniture.
I make half of the collars, cuffs, and shirts.
I turn out four-fifths of all the leather.
I make half the gloves.
I refine nearly nineteen-twentieths of the sugar.
I make half of the tobacco and cigars.
And yet, I am the great American problem.
When I pour out my blood on your altar of labour, and lay down my life
as a sacrifice to your god of toil, men make no more comment than at the
fall of a sparrow.
But my brawn is woven into the warp and woof of the fabric of your
national being.
My children shall be your children and your land shall be my land
because my sweat and my blood will cement the foundations of the America
of To-Morrow.
If I can be fused into the body politic, the Melting-Pot will have stood
the supreme test.
Afterword
I
_The Melting Pot_ is the third of the writer's plays to be published in
book form, though the first of the three in order of composition. But
unlike _The War God_ and _The Next Religion_, which are dramatisations
of the spiritual duels of our time, _The Melting Pot_ sprang directly
from the author's concrete experience as President of the Emigration
Regulation Department of the Jewish Territorial Organisation, which,
founded shortly after the great massacres of Jews in Russia, will soon
have fostered the settlement of ten thousand Russian Jews in the West of
the United States.
"Romantic claptrap," wrote Mr. A. B. Walkley in the _Times_ of "this
rhapsodising over music and crucibles and statues of Liberty." As if
these things were not the homeliest of realities, and rhapsodising the
natural response to them of the Russo-Jewish psychology, incurably
optimist. The statue of Liberty is a large visible object at the mouth
of New York harbour; the crucible, if visible only to the eye of
imagination like the inner reality of the sunrise to the eye of Blake,
is none the less a roaring and flaming actuality. These things are as
substantial, if not as important, as Adeline Genée and Anna Pavlova, the
objects of Mr. Walkley's own rhapsodising. Mr. Walkley, never having
lacked Liberty, nor cowered for days in a cellar in terror of a howling
mob, can see only theatrical exaggeration in the enthusiasm for a land
of freedom, just as, never having known or never having had eyes to see
the grotesque and tragic creatures existing all around us, he has
doubted the reality of some of Balzac's creations. It is to be feared
that for such a play as _The Melting Pot_ Mr. Walkley is far from being
the [Greek: charieis] of Aristotle. The ideal spectator must have known and felt
more of life than Mr. Walkley, who resembles too much the library-fed
man of letters whose denunciation by Walter Bagehot he himself quotes
without suspecting _de te fabula narratur_. Even the critic, who has to
deal with a refracted world, cannot dispense with primary experience of
his own. For "the adventures of a soul among masterpieces" it is not
only necessary there should be masterpieces, there must also be a soul.
Mr. Walkley, one of the wittiest of contemporary writers and within his
urban range one of the wisest, can scarcely be accused of lacking a
soul, though Mr. Bernard Shaw's long-enduring misconception of him as a
brother in the spirit is one of the comedies of literature. But such
spiritual vitality as Oxford failed to sterilise in him has been largely
torpified by his profession of play-taster, with its divorcement from
reality in the raw. His cry of "romantic claptrap" is merely the
reaction of the club armchair to the "drums and tramplings" of the
street. It is in fact (he will welcome an allusion to Dickens almost as
much as one to Aristotle) the higher Podsnappery. "Thus happily
acquainted with his own merit and importance, Mr. Podsnap settled that
whatever he put behind him he put out of existence.... The world got up
at eight, shaved close at a quarter past, breakfasted at nine, went to
the City at ten, came home at half-past five, and dined at seven."
Mr. Roosevelt, with his multifarious American experience as soldier and
cowboy, hunter and historian, police-captain and President, comes far
nearer the ideal spectator, for this play at least, than Mr. Walkley.
Yet his enthusiasm for it has been dismissed by our critic as
"stupendous _naïveté_." Mr. Roosevelt apparently falls under that class
of "people who knowing no rules, are at the mercy of their undisciplined
taste," which Mr. Walkley excludes altogether from his classification of
critics, in despite of Dr. Johnson's opinion that "natural judges" are
only second to "those who know but are above the rules." It is
comforting, therefore, to find Mr. Augustus Thomas, the famous American
playwright, who is familiar with the rules to the point of contempt,
chivalrously associating himself, in defence of a British rival, with
Mr. Roosevelt's "stupendous _naïveté_."
"Mr. Zangwill's 'rhapsodising' over music and crucibles and statues of
Liberty is," says Mr. Thomas, "a very effective use of a most potent
symbolism, and I have never seen men and women more sincerely stirred
than the audience at _The Melting Pot_. The impulses awakened by the
Zangwill play were those of wide human sympathy, charity, and
compassion; and, for my own part, I would rather retire from the theatre
and retire from all direct or indirect association with journalism than
write down the employment of these factors by Mr. Zangwill as mere
claptrap."
"As a work of art for art's sake," also wrote Mr. William Archer, "the
play simply does not exist." He added: "but Mr. Zangwill would not dream
of appealing to such a standard." Mr. Archer had the misfortune to see
the play in New York side by side with his more cynical _confrère_, and
thus his very praise has an air of apologia to Mr. Walkley and the great
doctrine of "art for art's sake." It would almost seem as if he even
takes a "work of art" and a "work of art for art's sake" as synonymous.
Nothing, in fact, could be more inartistic. "Art for art's sake" is one
species of art, whose right to existence the author has amply recognised
in other works. (_The King of Schnorrers_ was even read aloud by Oscar
Wilde to a duchess.) But he roundly denies that art is any the less
artistic for being inspired by life, and seeking in its turn to inspire
life. Such a contention is tainted by the very Philistinism it would
repudiate, since it seeks a negative test of art in something outside
art--to wit, purpose, whose presence is surely as irrelevant to art as
its absence. The only test of art is artistic quality, and this quality
_occurs_ perhaps more frequently than it is achieved, as in the words of
the Hebrew prophets, or the vision of a slum at night, the former
consciously aiming at something quite different, the latter achieving
its beauty in utter unconsciousness.
II
It will be seen from the official table of immigration that the Russian
Jew is only one and not even the largest of the fifty elements that, to
the tune of nearly a million and a half a year, are being fused in the
greatest "Melting Pot" the world has ever known; but if he has been
selected as the typical immigrant, it is because he alone of all the
fifty has no homeland. Some few other races, such as the Armenians, are
almost equally devoid of political power, and, in consequence, equally
obnoxious to massacre; but except the gipsy, whose essence is to be
homeless, there is no other race--black, white, red, or yellow--that has
not remained at least a majority of the population in some area of its
own. There is none, therefore, more in need of a land of liberty, none
to whose future it is more vital that America should preserve that
spirit of William Penn which President Wilson has so nobly
characterised. And there is assuredly none which has more valuable
elements to contribute to the ethnic and psychical amalgam of the people
of to-morrow.
The process of American amalgamation is not assimilation or simple
surrender to the dominant type, as is popularly supposed, but an
all-round give-and-take by which the final type may be enriched or
impoverished. Thus the intelligent reader will have remarked how the
somewhat anti-Semitic Irish servant of the first act talks Yiddish
herself in the fourth. Even as to the ultimate language of the United
States, it is unreasonable to suppose that American, though fortunately
protected by English literature, will not bear traces of the fifty
languages now being spoken side by side with it, and of which this play
alone presents scraps in German, French, Russian, Yiddish, Irish,
Hebrew, and Italian.
That in the crucible of love, or even co-citizenship, the most violent
antitheses of the past may be fused into a higher unity is a truth of
both ethics and observation, and it was in order to present historic
enmities at their extremes that the persecuted Jew of Russia and the
persecuting Russian race have been taken for protagonists--"the fell
incensèd points of mighty opposites."
The Jewish immigrant is, moreover, the toughest of all the white
elements that have been poured into the American crucible, the race
having, by its unique experience of several thousand years of exposure
to alien majorities, developed a salamandrine power of survival. And
this asbestoid fibre is made even more fireproof by the anti-Semitism of
American uncivilisation. Nevertheless, to suppose that America will
remain permanently afflicted by all the old European diseases would be
to despair of humanity, not to mention super-humanity.
III
Even the negrophobia is not likely to remain eternally at its present
barbarous pitch. Mr. William Archer, who has won a new fame as student
of that black problem, which is America's nemesis for her ancient
slave-raiding, and who favours the creation of a Black State as one of
the United States, observes: "It is noteworthy that neither David
Quixano nor anyone else in the play makes the slightest reference to
that inconvenient element in the crucible of God--the negro." This is an
oversight of Mr. Archer's, for Baron Revendal defends the Jew-baiting of
Russia by asking of an American: "Don't you lynch and roast your
niggers?" And David Quixano expressly throws both "black and yellow"
into the crucible. No doubt there is an instinctive antipathy which
tends to keep the white man free from black blood, though this antipathy
having been overcome by a large minority in all the many periods and all
the many countries of their contiguity, it is equally certain that there
are at work forces of attraction as well as of repulsion, and that even
upon the negro the "Melting Pot" of America will not fail to act in a
measure as it has acted on the Red Indian, who has found it almost as
facile to mate with his white neighbours as with his black. Indeed, it
is as much social prejudice as racial antipathy that to-day divides
black and white in the New World; and Sir Sydney Olivier has recorded
that in Jamaica the white is far more on his guard and his dignity
against the half-white than against the all-black, while in Guiana,
according to Sir Harry Johnston in his great work "The Negro in the New
World," it is the half-white that, in his turn, despises the black and
succeeds in marrying still further whitewards. It might have been
thought that the dark-white races on the northern shore of the
Mediterranean--the Spaniards, Sicilians, &c.--who have already been
crossed with the sons of Ham from its southern shore, would, among the
American immigrants, be the natural links towards the fusion of white
and black, but a similar instinct of pride and peril seems to hold them
back. But whether the antipathy in America be a race instinct or a
social prejudice, the accusations against the black are largely
panic-born myths, for the alleged repulsive smell of the negro is
consistent with being shaved by him, and the immorality of the negress
is consistent with her control of the nurseries of the South. The devil
is not so black nor the black so devilish as he is painted. This is not
to deny that the prognathous face is an ugly and undesirable type of
countenance or that it connotes a lower average of intellect and ethics,
or that white and black are as yet too far apart for profitable fusion.
Melanophobia, or fear of the black, may be pragmatically as valuable a
racial defence for the white as the counter-instinct of philoleucosis,
or love of the white, is a force of racial uplifting for the black. But
neither colour has succeeded in monopolising all the virtues and graces
in its specific evolution from the common ancestral ape, and a
superficial acquaintance with the work of Dr. Arthur Keith teaches that
if the black man is nearer the ape in some ways (having even the remains
of throat-pouches), the white man is nearer in other ways (as in his
greater hairiness).
And besides being, as Sir Sydney Olivier says, "a matrix of emotional
and spiritual energies that have yet to find their human expression,"
the African negro has obviously already not a few valuable ethnic
elements--joy of life, love of colour, keen senses, beautiful voice, and
ear for music--contributions that might somewhat compensate for the
dragging-down of the white and, in small doses at least, might one day
prove a tonic to an anæmic and art-less America. A musician like
Coleridge-Taylor is no despicable product of the "Melting Pot," while
the negroes of genius whom the writer has been privileged to know--men
like Henry O. Tanner, the painter, and Paul Laurence Dunbar, the
poet--show the potentialities of the race even without white admixture;
and as men of this stamp are capable of attracting cultured white
wives, the fusing process, beginning at the top with types like these,
should be far less unwelcome than that which starts with the dregs of
both races. But the negroid hair and complexion being, in Mendelian
language, "dominant," these black traits are not easy to eliminate from
the hybrid posterity; and in view of all the unpleasantness, both
immediate and contingent, that attends the blending of colours, only
heroic souls on either side should dare the adventure of intermarriage.
Blacks of this temper, however, would serve their race better by making
Liberia a success or building up an American negro State, as Mr. William
Archer recommends, or at least asserting their rights as American
citizens in that sub-tropical South which without their labour could
never have been opened up. Meantime, however scrupulously and
justifiably America avoids physical intermarriage with the negro, the
comic spirit cannot fail to note the spiritual miscegenation which,
while clothing, commercialising, and Christianising the ex-African, has
given "rag-time" and the sex-dances that go to it, first to white
America and thence to the whole white world.
The action of the crucible is thus not exclusively physical--a
consideration particularly important as regards the Jew. The Jew may be
Americanised and the American Judaised without any gamic interaction.
IV
Among the Jews _The Melting Pot_, though it has in some instances served
to interpret to each other the old generation and the new, has more
frequently been misunderstood by both. While a distinguished Christian
clergyman wrote that it was "calculated to do for the Jewish race what
'Uncle Tom's Cabin' did for the coloured man," the Jewish pulpits of
America have resounded with denunciation of its supposed solution of the
Jewish problem by dissolution. As if even a play with a purpose could do
more than suggest and interpret! It is true that its leading figure,
David Quixano, advocates absorption in America, but even he is speaking
solely of the American Jews and asks his uncle why, if he objects to the
dissolving process, he did not work for a separate Jewish land. He is
not offering a panacea for the Jewish problem, universally applicable.
But he urges that the conditions offered to the Jew in America are
without parallel throughout the world.
And, in sooth, the Jew is here citizen of a republic without a State
religion--a republic resting, moreover, on the same simple principles of
justice and equal rights as the Mosaic Commonwealth from which the
Puritan Fathers drew their inspiration. In America, therefore, the Jew,
by a roundabout journey from Zion, has come into his own again. It is by
no mere accident that when an inscription was needed for the colossal
statue of Liberty in New York Harbour, that "Mother of Exiles" whose
torch lights the entrance to the New Jerusalem, the best expression of
the spirit of Americanism was found in the sonnet of the Jewess, Emma
Lazarus:
_Give me your tired, your poor,_
_Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,_
_The wretched refuse of your teeming shore._
_Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,_
_I lift my lamp beside the golden door._
And if, alas! passing through the golden door, the Jew finds his New
Jerusalem as much a caricature by the crumbling of its early ideals as
the old became by the fading of the visions of Isaiah and Amos, he may
find his mission in fighting for the preservation of the original
Hebraic pattern. In this fight he will not be alone, and intermarriage
with his fellow-crusaders in the new Land of Promise will naturally
follow wherever, as with David Quixano and Vera Revendal, no theological
differences divide. There will be neither Jew nor Greek. Intermarriage,
wherever there is social intimacy, will follow, even when the parties
stand in opposite religious camps; but this is less advisable as leading
to a house divided against itself and to dissension in the upbringing of
the children. It is only when a common outlook has been reached,
transcending the old doctrinal differences, that intermarriage is
denuded of those latent discords which the instinct of mankind divines,
and which keep even Catholic and Protestant wisely apart.
These discords, together with the prevalent anti-Semitism and his own
ingrained persistence, tend to preserve the Jew even in the "Melting
Pot," so that his dissolution must be necessarily slower than that of
the similar aggregations of Germans, Italians, or Poles. But the process
for all is the same, however tempered by specific factors. Beginning as
broken-off bits of Germany, Italy, or Poland, with newspapers and
theatres in German, Italian, or Polish, these colonies gradually become
Americanised, their vernaculars, even when jealously cherished, become a
mere medium for American conceptions of life; while in the third
generation the child is ashamed both of its parents and their lingo, the
newspapers dwindle in circulation, the theatres languish. The reality of
this process has been denied by no less distinguished an American than
Dr. Charles Eliot, ex-President of Harvard University, whose prophecy of
Jewish solidarity in America and of the contribution of Judaism to the
world's future is more optimistic than my own. Dr. Eliot points to the
still unmelted heaps of racial matter, without suspecting--although he
is a chemist--that their semblance of solidity is only kept up by the
constant immigration of similar atoms to the base to replace those
liquefied at the apex. Once America slams her doors, the crucible will
roar like a closed furnace.
Heaven forbid, however, that the doors shall be slammed for centuries
yet. The notion that the few millions of people in America have a moral
right to exclude others is monstrous. Exclusiveness may have some
justification in countries, especially when old and well-populated; but
for continents like the United States--or for the matter of that Canada
and Australia--to mistake themselves for mere countries is an
intolerable injustice to the rest of the human race.
The exclusion of criminals even is as impossible in practice as the
exclusion of the sick and ailing is unchristian. Infinitely more
important were it to keep the gates of _birth_ free from undesirables.
As for the exclusion of the able-bodied, whether illiterate or literate,
that is sheer economic madness in so empty a continent, especially with
the Panama Canal to divert them to the least developed States.
Fortunately, any serious restriction will avenge itself not only by the
stagnation of many of the States, but by the paralysis of the great
liners which depend on steerage passengers, without whom freights and
fares will rise and saloon passengers be docked of their sailing
facilities. Meantime the inquisition at Ellis Island has to its account
cruelties no less atrocious than the ancient Spanish--cruelties that
only flash into momentary prominence when some luxurious music-hall lady
of dubious morals has a taste of the barbarities meted out daily to
blameless and hard-working refugees from oppression or hunger, who,
having staked their all on the great adventure, find themselves hustled
back, penniless and heartbroken, to the Old World.
V
Whether any country will ever again be based like those of the Old World
upon a unity of race or religion is a matter of doubt. New England, of
course, like Pennsylvania and Maryland, owes its inception to religion,
but the original impulse has long been submerged by purely economic
pressures. And the same motley immigration from the Old World is
building up the bulk of the coming countries. At most, the dominant
language gives a semblance of unity and serves to attract a considerable
stream of immigrants who speak it, as of Portuguese to Brazil, Spaniards
to the Argentine. But the chief magnet remains economic, for Brazil
draws six times as many Italians as Portuguese, and the Argentine two
and a half times as many Italians as Spanish. It may be urged, of
course, that the Italian gravitation to these countries is still a
matter of race, and that, in the absence of an El Dorado of his own, the
Italian is attracted towards States that are at least Latin. But though
Brazil and the Argentine be predominantly Latin, the minority of
Germans, Austrians, and Swiss is by no means insignificant. The great
modern steamship, in fact--supplemented by its wandering and seductive
agent--is playing the part in the world formerly played by invasions and
crusades, while the "economic" immigrant is more and more replacing the
refugee, just as the purely commercial company working under native law
is replacing the Chartered Company which was a law to itself. How small
a part in the modern movement is played by patriotism proper may be seen
from the avidity with which the farmers of the United States cross the
borders to Canada to obtain the large free holdings which enable them to
sell off their American properties. How little the proudest tradition
counts against the environment is shown in the shame felt by
Argentine-born children for the English spoken by their British parents.
The difference in the method of importing the ingredients makes thus no
difference to the action of the crucible. Though the peoples now in
process of formation in the New World are being recruited by mainly
economic forces, it may be predicted they will ultimately harden into
homogeneity of race, if not even of belief. For internationalism in
religion seems to be again receding in favour of national religions (if,
indeed, these were ever more than superficially superseded), at any rate
in favour of nationalism raised into religion.
If racial homogeneity has not yet been evolved completely even in
England--and, of course, the tendency can never be more than
asymptotic--it is because cheap and easy transport and communication,
with freedom of economic movement, have been late developments and are
still far from perfect. Hence, there has never been a thorough shake-up
and admixture of elements, so that certain counties and corners have
retained types and breeds peculiar to them. But with the ever-growing
interconnection of all parts of the country, and with the multiplication
of labour bureaux, these breeds and types will be--alas, for local
colour!--increasingly absorbed in the general mass. For fusion and
unification are part of the historic life-process. "Normans and Saxons
and Danes" are we here in England, yes and Huguenots and Flemings and
Gascons and Angevins and Jews and many other things.
In fact, according to Sir Harry Johnston, there is hardly an ethnic
element that has not entered into the Englishman, including even the
missing link, as the Piltdown skull would seem to testify. The earlier
discovery at Galley Hill showed Britannia rising from the apes with an
extinct Tasmanian type, not unlike the surviving aboriginal Australian.
Then the west of Britain was invaded by a negroid type from France
followed by an Eskimo type of which traces are still to be seen in the
West of Ireland and parts of Scotland. Next came the true Mediterranean
white man, the Iberian, with dark hair and eyes and a white skin; and
then the round-headed people of the Bronze Age, probably Asiatic. And
then the Gael, the long-headed, fair-haired Aryan, who ruled by iron and
whose Keltic vocabulary was tinged with Iberian, and who was followed by
the Brython or Belgian. And, at some unknown date, we have to allow for
the invasion of North Britain by another Germanic type, the Caledonian,
which would seem to have been a Norse stock, foreshadowing the later
Norman Conquest. And, as if this mish-mash was not confusion enough,
came to make it worse confounded the Roman conquerors, trailing like a
mantle of many colours the subject-races of their far-flung Empire.
Is it wonderful if the crucible, capable of fusing such a motley of
types into "the true-born Briton," should be melting up its Jews like
old silver? The comparison belongs to Mr. Walkley, who was more moved by
the beauty of the old and the pathos of its passing than by the
resplendence of the new, and who seemed to forget that it is for the
dramatist to register both impartially--their conflict constituting
another of those spiritual duels which are peculiarly his affair. Jews
are, unlike negroes, a "recessive" type, whose physical traits tend to
disappear in the blended offspring. There does not exist in England
to-day a single representative of the Jewish families whom Cromwell
admitted, though their lineage may be traced in not a few noble
families. Thus every country has been and is a "Melting Pot." But
America, exhibiting the normal fusing process magnified many thousand
diameters and diversified beyond all historic experience, and fed not by
successive waves of immigration but by a hodge-podge of simultaneous
hordes, is, in Bacon's phrase, an "ostensive instance" of a universal
phenomenon. America is _the_ "Melting Pot."
Her people has already begun to take on such a complexion of its own, it
is already so emphatically tending to a new race, crossed with every
European type, that the British illusion of a cousinly Anglo-Saxon
people with whom war is unthinkable is sheer wilful blindness. Even
to-day, while the mixture is still largely mechanical not chemical, the
Anglo-Saxon element is only preponderant; it is very far from being the
sum total.
VI
While our sluggish and sensual English stage has resisted and even
burked the writer's attempt to express in terms of the theatre our
European problems of war and religion, and to interpret through art the
"years of the modern, years of the unperformed," it remains to be
acknowledged with gratitude that this play, designed to bring home to
America both its comparative rawness and emptiness and its true
significance and potentiality for history and civilisation, has been
universally acclaimed by Americans as a revelation of Americanism,
despite that it contains only one native-born American character, and
that a bad one. Played throughout the length and breadth of the States
since its original production in 1908, given, moreover, in Universities
and Women's Colleges, passing through edition after edition in book
form, cited by preachers and journalists, politicians and Presidential
candidates, even calling into existence a "Melting Pot" Club in Boston,
it has had the happy fortune to contribute its title to current thought,
and, in the testimony of Jane Addams, to "perform a great service to
America by reminding us of the high hopes of the founders of the
Republic."
I. Z.
_January 1914._
Printed in the United States of America.