No reverberatory effect of the great war has caused American public
opinion more solicitude than the failure of the “melting-pot.” The
discovery of diverse nationalistic feelings among our great alien
population has come to most people as an intense shock. It has brought
out the unpleasant inconsistencies of our traditional beliefs. We
have had to watch hard-hearted old Brahmins virtuously indignant at
the spectacle of the immigrant refusing to be melted, while they jeer
at patriots like Mary Antin who write about “our forefathers.” We
have had to listen to publicists who express themselves as stunned
by the evidence of vigorous nationalistic and cultural movements in
this country among Germans, Scandinavians, Bohemians, and Poles,
while in the same breath they insist that the alien shall be forcibly
assimilated to that Anglo-Saxon tradition which they unquestioningly
label “American.”
As the unpleasant truth has come upon us that assimilation in this
country was proceeding on lines very different from those we had
marked out for it, we found ourselves inclined to blame those who were
thwarting our prophecies. The truth became culpable. We blamed the
war, we blamed the Germans. And then we discovered with a moral shock
that these movements had been making great headway before the war even
began. We found that the tendency, reprehensible and paradoxical as it
might be, has been for the national clusters of immigrants, as they
became more and more firmly established and more and more prosperous,
to cultivate more and more assiduously the literatures and cultural
traditions of their homelands. Assimilation, in other words, instead of
washing out the memories of Europe, made them more and more intensely
real. Just as these clusters became more and more objectively American,
did they become more and more German or Scandinavian or Bohemian or
Polish.
To face the fact that our aliens are already strong enough to take
a share in the direction of their own destiny, and that the strong
cultural movements represented by the foreign press, schools, and
colonies are a challenge to our facile attempts, is not, however, to
admit the failure of Americanization. It is not to fear the failure
of democracy. It is rather to urge us to an investigation of what
Americanism may rightly mean. It is to ask ourselves whether our ideal
has been broad or narrow--whether perhaps the time has not come to
assert a higher ideal than the “melting-pot.” Surely we cannot be
certain of our spiritual democracy when, claiming to melt the nations
within us to a comprehension of our free and democratic institutions,
we fly into panic at the first sign of their own will and tendency.
We act as if we wanted Americanization to take place only on our own
terms, and not by the consent of the governed. All our elaborate
machinery of settlement and school and union, of social and political
naturalization, however, will move with friction just in so far as it
neglects to take into account this strong and virile insistence that
America shall be what the immigrant will have a hand in making it, and
not what a ruling class, descendant of those British stocks which were
the first permanent immigrants, decide that America shall be made. This
is the condition which confronts us, and which demands a clear and
general readjustment of our attitude and our ideal.
I
Mary Antin is right when she looks upon our foreign-born as the
people who missed the Mayflower and came over on the first boat they
could find. But she forgets that when they did come it was not upon
other Mayflowers, but upon a “Maiblume,” a “Fleur de Mai,” a “Fior di
Maggio,” a “Majblomst.” These people were not mere arrivals from the
same family, to be welcomed as understood and long-loved, but strangers
to the neighborhood, with whom a long process of settling down had
to take place. For they brought with them their national and racial
characters, and each new national quota had to wear slowly away the
contempt with which its mere alienness got itself greeted. Each had to
make its way slowly from the lowest strata of unskilled labor up to a
level where it satisfied the accredited norms of social success.
We are all foreign-born or the descendants of foreign-born, and if
distinctions are to be made between us they should rightly be on some
other ground than indigenousness. The early colonists came over with
motives no less colonial than the later. They did not come to be
assimilated in an American melting-pot. They did not come to adopt the
culture of the American Indian. They had not the smallest intention
of “giving themselves without reservation” to the new country. They
came to get freedom to live as they wanted to. They came to escape
from the stifling air and chaos of the old world; they came to make
their fortune in a new land. They invented no new social framework.
Rather they brought over bodily the old ways to which they had been
accustomed. Tightly concentrated on a hostile frontier, they were
conservative beyond belief. Their pioneer daring was reserved for the
objective conquest of material resources. In their folkways, in their
social and political institutions, they were, like every colonial
people, slavishly imitative of the mother-country. So that, in spite of
the “Revolution,” our whole legal and political system remained more
English than the English, petrified and unchanging, while in England
itself law developed to meet the needs of the changing times.
It is just this English-American conservatism that has been our chief
obstacle to social advance. We have needed the new peoples--the order
of the German and Scandinavian, the turbulence of the Slav and Hun--to
save us from our own stagnation. I do not mean that the illiterate
Slav is now the equal of the New Englander of pure descent. He is
raw material to be educated, not into a New Englander, but into a
socialized American along such lines as those thirty nationalities
are being educated in the amazing schools of Gary. I do not believe
that this process is to be one of decades of evolution. The spectacle
of Japan’s sudden jump from mediævalism to post-modernism should have
destroyed that superstition. We are not dealing with individuals who
are to “evolve.” We are dealing with their children, who, with that
education we are about to have, will start level with all of us. Let us
cease to think of ideals like democracy as magical qualities inherent
in certain peoples. Let us speak, not of inferior races, but of
inferior civilizations. We are all to educate and to be educated. These
peoples in America are in a common enterprise. It is not what we are
now that concerns us, but what this plastic next generation may become
in the light of a new cosmopolitan ideal.
We are not dealing with static factors, but with fluid and dynamic
generations. To contrast the older and the newer immigrants and see
the one class as democratically motivated by love of liberty, and
the other by mere money-getting, is not to illuminate the future. To
think of earlier nationalities as culturally assimilated to America,
while we picture the later as a sodden and resistive mass, makes
only for bitterness and misunderstanding. There may be a difference
between these earlier and these later stocks, but it lies neither
in motive for coming nor in strength of cultural allegiance to the
homeland. The truth is that no more tenacious cultural allegiance to
the mother country has been shown by any alien nation than by the
ruling class of Anglo-Saxon descendants in these American States.
English snobberies, English religion, English literary styles, English
literary reverences and canons, English ethics, English superiorities,
have been the cultural food that we have drunk in from our mothers’
breasts. The distinctively American spirit--pioneer, as distinguished
from the reminiscently English--that appears in Whitman and Emerson
and James, has had to exist on sufferance alongside of this other
cult, unconsciously belittled by our cultural makers of opinion. No
country has perhaps had so great indigenous genius which had so little
influence on the country’s traditions and expressions. The unpopular
and dreaded German-American of the present day is a beginning amateur
in comparison with those foolish Anglophiles of Boston and New York
and Philadelphia whose reversion to cultural type sees uncritically
in England’s cause the cause of Civilization, and, under the guise of
ethical independence of thought, carries along European traditions
which are no more “American” than the German categories themselves.
It speaks well for German-American innocence of heart or else for its
lack of imagination that it has not turned the hyphen stigma into a “Tu
quoque!” If there were to be any hyphens scattered about, clearly they
should be affixed to those English descendants who had had centuries of
time to be made American where the German had had only half a century.
Most significantly has the war brought out of them this alien virus,
showing them still loving English things, owing allegiance to the
English Kultur, moved by English shibboleths and prejudice. It is only
because it has been the ruling class in this country that bestowed the
epithets that we have not heard copiously and scornfully of “hyphenated
English-Americans.” But even our quarrels with England have had the
bad temper, the extravagance, of family quarrels. The Englishman of
to-day nags us and dislikes us in that personal, peculiarly intimate
way in which he dislikes the Australian, or as we may dislike our
younger brothers. He still thinks of us incorrigibly as “colonials.”
America--official, controlling, literary, political America--is
still, as a writer recently expressed it, “culturally speaking, a
self-governing dominion of the British Empire.”
The non-English American can scarcely be blamed if he sometimes
thinks of the Anglo-Saxon predominance in America as little more than
a predominance of priority. The Anglo-Saxon was merely the first
immigrant, the first to found a colony. He has never really ceased
to be the descendant of immigrants, nor has he ever succeeded in
transforming that colony into a real nation, with a tenacious, richly
woven fabric of native culture. Colonials from the other nations have
come and settled down beside him. They found no definite native culture
which should startle them out of their colonialism, and consequently
they looked back to their mother-country, as the earlier Anglo-Saxon
immigrant was looking back to his. What has been offered the newcomer
has been the chance to learn English, to become a citizen, to salute
the flag. And those elements of our ruling classes who are responsible
for the public schools, the settlements, all the organizations for
amelioration in the cities, have every reason to be proud of the
care and labor which they have devoted to absorbing the immigrant.
His opportunities the immigrant has taken to gladly, with almost a
pathetic eagerness to make his way in the new land without friction or
disturbance. The common language has made not only for the necessary
communication, but for all the amenities of life.
If freedom means the right to do pretty much as one pleases, so long as
one does not interfere with others, the immigrant has found freedom,
and the ruling element has been singularly liberal in its treatment
of the invading hordes. But if freedom means a democratic coöperation
in determining the ideals and purposes and industrial and social
institutions of a country, then the immigrant has not been free, and
the Anglo-Saxon element is guilty of just what every dominant race
is guilty of in every European country: the imposition of its own
culture upon the minority peoples. The fact that this imposition has
been so mild and, indeed, semi-conscious does not alter its quality.
And the war has brought out just the degree to which that purpose of
“Americanizing,” that is to say, “Anglo-Saxonizing,” the immigrant has
failed.
For the Anglo-Saxon now in his bitterness to turn upon the other
peoples, talk about their “arrogance,” scold them for not being melted
in a pot which never existed, is to betray the unconscious purpose
which lay at the bottom of his heart. It betrays too the possession
of a racial jealousy similar to that of which he is now accusing the
so-called “hyphenates.” Let the Anglo-Saxon be proud enough of the
heroic toil and heroic sacrifices which moulded the nation. But let
him ask himself, if he had had to depend on the English descendants,
where he would have been living to-day. To those of us who see in the
exploitation of unskilled labor the strident red _leit-motif_ of our
civilization, the settling of the country presents a great social drama
as the waves of immigration broke over it.
Let the Anglo-Saxon ask himself where he would have been if these
races had not come? Let those who feel the inferiority of the
non-Anglo-Saxon immigrant contemplate that region of the States which
has remained the most distinctively “American,” the South. Let him
ask himself whether he would really like to see the foreign hordes
Americanized into such an Americanization. Let him ask himself how
superior this native civilization is to the great “alien” states of
Wisconsin and Minnesota, where Scandinavians, Poles, and Germans have
self-consciously labored to preserve their traditional culture, while
being outwardly and satisfactorily American. Let him ask himself how
much more wisdom, intelligence, industry and social leadership has come
out of these alien states than out of all the truly American ones. The
South, in fact, while this vast Northern development has gone on, still
remains an English colony, stagnant and complacent, having progressed
culturally scarcely beyond the early Victorian era. It is culturally
sterile because it has had no advantage of cross-fertilization like
the Northern states. What has happened in states such as Wisconsin
and Minnesota is that strong foreign cultures have struck root in a
new and fertile soil. America has meant liberation, and German and
Scandinavian political ideas and social energies have expanded to a new
potency. The process has not been at all the fancied “assimilation”
of the Scandinavian or Teuton. Rather has it been a process of their
assimilation of us--I speak as an Anglo-Saxon. The foreign cultures
have not been melted down or run together, made into some homogeneous
Americanism, but have remained distinct but coöperating to the greater
glory and benefit, not only of themselves but of all the native
“Americanism” around them.
What we emphatically do not want is that these distinctive qualities
should be washed out into a tasteless, colorless fluid of uniformity.
Already we have far too much of this insipidity,--masses of people
who are cultural half-breeds, neither assimilated Anglo-Saxons nor
nationals of another culture. Each national colony in this country
seems to retain in its foreign press, its vernacular literature, its
schools, its intellectual and patriotic leaders, a central cultural
nucleus. From this nucleus the colony extends out by imperceptible
gradations to a fringe where national characteristics are all but lost.
Our cities are filled with these half-breeds who retain their foreign
names but have lost the foreign savor. This does not mean that they
have actually been changed into New Englanders or Middle Westerners. It
does not mean that they have been really Americanized. It means that,
letting slip from them whatever native culture they had, they have
substituted for it only the most rudimentary American--the American
culture of the cheap newspaper, the “movies,” the popular song, the
ubiquitous automobile. The unthinking who survey this class call them
assimilated, Americanized. The great American public school has done
its work. With these people our institutions are safe. We may thrill
with dread at the aggressive hyphenate, but this tame flabbiness is
accepted as Americanization. The same moulders of opinion whose ideal
is to melt the different races into Anglo-Saxon gold hail this poor
product as the satisfying result of their alchemy.
Yet a truer cultural sense would have told us that it is not the
self-conscious cultural nuclei that sap at our American life, but these
fringes. It is not the Jew who sticks proudly to the faith of his
fathers and boasts of that venerable culture of his who is dangerous
to America, but the Jew who has lost the Jewish fire and become a
mere elementary, grasping animal. It is not the Bohemian who supports
the Bohemian schools in Chicago whose influence is sinister, but the
Bohemian who has made money and has got into ward politics. Just so
surely as we tend to disintegrate these nuclei of nationalistic culture
do we tend to create hordes of men and women without a spiritual
country, cultural outlaws, without taste, without standards but those
of the mob. We sentence them to live on the most rudimentary planes
of American life. The influences at the center of the nuclei are
centripetal. They make for the intelligence and the social values which
mean an enhancement of life. And just because the foreign-born retains
this expressiveness is he likely to be a better citizen of the American
community. The influences at the fringe, however, are centrifugal,
anarchical. They make for detached fragments of peoples. Those who
came to find liberty achieve only license. They become the flotsam and
jetsam of American life, the downward undertow of our civilization with
its leering cheapness and falseness of taste and spiritual outlook, the
absence of mind and sincere feeling which we see in our slovenly towns,
our vapid moving pictures, our popular novels, and in the vacuous faces
of the crowds on the city street. This is the cultural wreckage of our
time, and it is from the fringes of the Anglo-Saxon as well as the
other stocks that it falls. America has as yet no impelling integrating
force. It makes too easily for this detritus of cultures. In our
loose, free country, no constraining national purpose, no tenacious
folk-tradition and folk-style hold the people to a line.
The war has shown us that not in any magical formula will this purpose
be found. No intense nationalism of the European plan can be ours.
But do we not begin to see a new and more adventurous ideal? Do we
not see how the national colonies in America, deriving power from
the deep cultural heart of Europe and yet living here in mutual
toleration, freed from the age-long tangles of races, creeds, and
dynasties, may work out a federated ideal? America is transplanted
Europe, but a Europe that has not been disintegrated and scattered
in the transplanting as in some Dispersion. Its colonies live here
inextricably mingled, yet not homogeneous. They merge but they do not
fuse.
America is a unique sociological fabric, and it bespeaks poverty of
imagination not to be thrilled at the incalculable potentialities of
so novel a union of men. To seek no other goal than the weary old
nationalism,--belligerent, exclusive, in-breeding, the poison of which
we are witnessing now in Europe,--is to make patriotism a hollow sham,
and to declare that, in spite of our boastings, America must ever be a
follower and not a leader of nations.