The failure of the melting-pot, far from closing the great American
democratic experiment, means that it has only just begun. Whatever
American nationalism turns out to be, we see already that it will
have a color richer and more exciting than our ideal has hitherto
encompassed. In a world which has dreamed of internationalism, we find
that we have all unawares been building up the first international
nation. The voices which have cried for a tight and jealous
nationalism of the European pattern are failing. From that ideal,
however valiantly and disinterestedly it has been set for us, time and
tendency have moved us further and further away. What we have achieved
has been rather a cosmopolitan federation of national colonies, of
foreign cultures, from which the sting of devastating competition has
been removed. America is already the world-federation in miniature,
the continent where for the first time in history has been achieved
that miracle of hope, the peaceful living side by side, with character
substantially preserved, of the most heterogeneous peoples under the
sun. Nowhere else has such contiguity been anything but the breeder of
misery. Here, notwithstanding our tragic failures of adjustment, the
outlines are already too clear not to give us a new vision and a new
orientation of the American mind in the world.
It is for the American of the younger generation to accept this
cosmopolitanism, and carry it along with self-conscious and fruitful
purpose. In his colleges, he is already getting, with the study
of modern history and politics, the modern literatures, economic
geography, the privilege of a cosmopolitan outlook such as the people
of no other nation of to-day in Europe can possibly secure. If he is
still a colonial, he is no longer the colonial of one partial culture,
but of many. He is a colonial of the world. Colonialism has grown
into cosmopolitanism, and his motherhood is not one nation, but all
who have anything life-enhancing to offer to the spirit. That vague
sympathy which the France of ten years ago was feeling for the world--a
sympathy which was drowned in the terrible reality of war--may be the
modern American’s, and that in a positive and aggressive sense. If the
American is parochial, it is in sheer wantonness or cowardice. His
provincialism is the measure of his fear of bogies or the defect of his
imagination.
Indeed, it is not uncommon for the eager Anglo-Saxon who goes to a
vivid American university to-day to find his true friends not among
his own race but among the acclimatized German or Austrian, the
acclimatized Jew, the acclimatized Scandinavian or Italian. In them
he finds the cosmopolitan note. In these youths, foreign-born or the
children of foreign-born parents, he is likely to find many of his
old inbred morbid problems washed away. These friends are oblivious
to the repressions of that tight little society in which he so
provincially grew up. He has a pleasurable sense of liberation from
the stale and familiar attitudes of those whose ingrowing culture has
scarcely created anything vital for his America of to-day. He breathes
a larger air. In his new enthusiasms for continental literature, for
unplumbed Russian depths, for French clarity of thought, for Teuton
philosophies of power, he feels himself citizen of a larger world. He
may be absurdly superficial, his outward-reaching wonder may ignore all
the stiller and homelier virtues of his Anglo-Saxon home, but he has at
least found the clue to that international mind which will be essential
to all men and women of good-will if they are ever to save this Western
world of ours from suicide. His new friends have gone through a similar
evolution. America has burned most of the baser metal also from them.
Meeting now with this common American background, all of them may yet
retain that distinctiveness of their native cultures and their national
spiritual slants. They are more valuable and interesting to each other
for being different, yet that difference could not be creative were it
not for this new cosmopolitan outlook which America has given them and
which they all equally possess.
A college where such a spirit is possible even to the smallest degree,
has within itself already the seeds of this international intellectual
world of the future. It suggests that the contribution of America will
be an intellectual internationalism which goes far beyond the mere
exchange of scientific ideas and discoveries and the cold recording of
facts. It will be an intellectual sympathy which is not satisfied until
it has got at the heart of the different cultural expressions, and
felt as they feel. It may have immense preferences, but it will make
understanding and not indignation its end. Such a sympathy will unite
and not divide.
Against the thinly disguised panic which calls itself “patriotism”
and the thinly disguised militarism which calls itself “preparedness”
the cosmopolitan ideal is set. This does not mean that those who hold
it are for a policy of drift. They, too, long passionately for an
integrated and disciplined America. But they do not want one which is
integrated only for domestic economic exploitation of the workers or
for predatory economic imperialism among the weaker peoples. They do
not want one that is integrated by coercion or militarism, or for the
truculent assertion of a mediæval code of honor and of doubtful rights.
They believe that the most effective integration will be one which
coördinates the diverse elements and turns them consciously toward
working out together the place of America in the world-situation. They
demand for integration a genuine integrity, a wholeness and soundness
of enthusiasm and purpose which can only come when no national colony
within our America feels that it is being discriminated against or that
its cultural case is being prejudged. This strength of coöperation,
this feeling that all who are here may have a hand in the destiny of
America, will make for a finer spirit of integration than any narrow
“Americanism” or forced chauvinism.
In this effort we may have to accept some form of that dual citizenship
which meets with so much articulate horror among us. Dual citizenship
we may have to recognize as the rudimentary form of that international
citizenship to which, if our words mean anything, we aspire. We have
assumed unquestioningly that mere participation in the political life
of the United States must cut the new citizen off from all sympathy
with his old allegiance. Anything but a bodily transfer of devotion
from one sovereignty to another has been viewed as a sort of moral
treason against the Republic. We have insisted that the immigrant
whom we welcomed escaping from the very exclusive nationalism of his
European home shall forthwith adopt a nationalism just as exclusive,
just as narrow, and even less legitimate because it is founded on no
warm traditions of his own. Yet a nation like France is said to permit
a formal and legal dual citizenship even at the present time. Though a
citizen of hers may pretend to cast off his allegiance in favor of some
other sovereignty, he is still subject to her laws when he returns.
Once a citizen, always a citizen, no matter how many new citizenships
he may embrace. And such a dual citizenship seems to us sound and
right. For it recognizes that, although the Frenchman may accept the
formal institutional framework of his new country and indeed become
intensely loyal to it, yet his Frenchness he will never lose. What
makes up the fabric of his soul will always be of this Frenchness,
so that unless he becomes utterly degenerate he will always to some
degree dwell still in his native environment.
Indeed, does not the cultivated American who goes to Europe practise a
dual citizenship, which, if not formal, is no less real? The American
who lives abroad may be the least expatriate of men. If he falls in
love with French ways and French thinking and French democracy and
seeks to saturate himself with the new spirit, he is guilty of at least
a dual spiritual citizenship. He may be still American, yet he feels
himself through sympathy also a Frenchman. And he finds that this
expansion involves no shameful conflict within him, no surrender of his
native attitude. He has rather for the first time caught a glimpse of
the cosmopolitan spirit. And after wandering about through many races
and civilizations he may return to America to find them all here living
vividly and crudely, seeking the same adjustment that he made. He sees
the new peoples here with a new vision. They are no longer masses of
aliens, waiting to be “assimilated,” waiting to be melted down into
the indistinguishable dough of Anglo-Saxonism. They are rather threads
of living and potent cultures, blindly striving to weave themselves
into a novel international nation, the first the world has seen. In an
Austria-Hungary or a Prussia the stronger of these cultures would be
moving almost instinctively to subjugate the weaker. But in America
those wills-to-power are turned in a different direction into learning
how to live together.
Along with dual citizenship we shall have to accept, I think, that free
and mobile passage of the immigrant between America and his native
land again which now arouses so much prejudice among us. We shall have
to accept the immigrant’s return for the same reason that we consider
justified our own flitting about the earth. To stigmatize the alien
who works in America for a few years and returns to his own land,
only perhaps to seek American fortune again, is to think in narrow
nationalistic terms. It is to ignore the cosmopolitan significance of
this migration. It is to ignore the fact that the returning immigrant
is often a missionary to an inferior civilization.
This migratory habit has been especially common with the unskilled
laborers who have been pouring into the United States in the last
dozen years from every country in southeastern Europe. Many of them
return to spend their earnings in their own country or to serve
their country in war. But they return with an entirely new critical
outlook, and a sense of the superiority of American organization to the
primitive living around them. This continued passage to and fro has
already raised the material standard of living in many regions of these
backward countries. For these regions are thus endowed with exactly
what they need, the capital for the exploitation of their natural
resources, and the spirit of enterprise. America is thus educating
these laggard peoples from the very bottom of society up, awaking vast
masses to a new-born hope for the future. In the migratory Greek,
therefore, we have not the parasitic alien, the doubtful American
asset, but a symbol of that cosmopolitan interchange which is coming,
in spite of all war and national exclusiveness.
Only America, by reason of the unique liberty of opportunity and
traditional isolation for which she seems to stand, can lead in this
cosmopolitan enterprise. Only the American--and in this category
I include the migratory alien who has lived with us and caught the
pioneer spirit and a sense of new social vistas--has the chance to
become that citizen of the world. America is coming to be, not a
nationality but a trans-nationality, a weaving back and forth, with
the other lands, of many threads of all sizes and colors. Any movement
which attempts to thwart this weaving, or to dye the fabric any one
color, or disentangle the threads of the strands, is false to this
cosmopolitan vision. I do not mean that we shall necessarily glut
ourselves with the raw product of humanity. It would be folly to absorb
the nations faster than we could weave them. We have no duty either to
admit or reject. It is purely a question of expediency. What concerns
us is the fact that the strands are here. We must have a policy and an
ideal for an actual situation. Our question is, What shall we do with
our America? How are we likely to get the more creative America--by
confining our imaginations to the ideal of the melting-pot, or
broadening them to some such cosmopolitan conception as I have been
vaguely sketching?
We cannot Americanize America worthily by sentimentalizing and
moralizing history. When the best schools are expressly renouncing
the questionable duty of teaching patriotism by means of history, it
is not the time to force shibboleth upon the immigrant. This form of
Americanization has been heard because it appealed to the vestiges of
our old sentimentalized and moralized patriotism. This has so far held
the field as the expression of the new American’s new devotion. The
inflections of other voices have been drowned. They must be heard. We
must see if the lesson of the war has not been for hundreds of these
later Americans a vivid realization of their trans-nationality, a new
consciousness of what America means to them as a citizenship in the
world. It is the vague historic idealisms which have provided the fuel
for the European flame. Our American ideal can make no progress until
we do away with this romantic gilding of the past.
All our idealisms must be those of future social goals in which all
can participate, the good life of personality lived in the environment
of the Beloved Community. No mere doubtful triumphs of the past,
which redound to the glory of only one of our trans-nationalities,
can satisfy us. It must be a future America, on which all can unite,
which pulls us irresistibly toward it, as we understand each other more
warmly.
To make real this striving amid dangers and apathies is work for a
younger intelligentsia of America. Here is an enterprise of integration
into which we can all pour ourselves, of a spiritual welding which
should make us, if the final menace ever came, not weaker, but
infinitely strong.