by 1892 there was a critical embargo placed upon foreign literature.
“Every nation,” we were told, “ought to supply its own second-rate
books,”--like domestic sheeting and ginghams. An acquaintance with
English authors was held to be a misdemeanour. Why quote Mr. Matthew
Arnold, when you might quote Mr. Lowell? Why write about Becky Sharp,
when you might write about Hester Prynne? Why laugh over Dickens, when
you might laugh over Mark Twain? Why eat artichokes, when you might
eat corn? American school-boys, we were told, must be guarded from
the feudalism of Scott. American speech must be guarded from the
“insularities” of England’s English. “That failure in good sense which
comes from too warm a self-satisfaction” (Mr. Arnold does sometimes say
a thing very well) robbed us for years of mental poise, of adjusted
standards, of an unencumbered outlook upon life.
It is strange to glance back upon a day when we had so little to
trouble us that we could vex our souls over feudalism and fiction;
when--in the absence of serious problems--we could raise pronunciation
or spelling into a national issue. Americanism has done with
trivialities, patriotism with matters of taste. Love for one’s country
is not a shallow sentiment, based upon self-esteem. It is a profound
and primitive passion. It may lie dormant in our souls when all goes
well. It may be thwarted and frustrated by the exigencies of party
government. It may be dissevered from pride or pleasure. But it is
part of ourselves, wholly beyond analysis, fed upon hope and fear, joy
and sorrow, glory and shame. If, after the fashion of the world, we
drowsed in our day of security, we have been rudely and permanently
awakened. The shadow of mighty events has fallen across our path.
We have witnessed a great national crime. We have beheld the utmost
heights of heroism. And when we asked of what concern to us were this
crime and this heroism, the answer came unexpectedly, and with blinding
force. The sea was strewn with our dead, our honour was undermined by
conspiracies, our factories were fired, our cargoes dynamited. We were
a neutral nation at peace with the world. The attack made upon our
industries and upon our good name was secret, malignant, and pitiless.
It was organized warfare, without the courage and candour of war.
The unavowed enemy who strikes in the dark is hard to reach, but he
is outside the pale of charity. There was something in the cold fury
of Mr. Wilson’s words, when, in his message to Congress, he denounced
the traitors “who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the
very arteries of our national life,” which turned that unexpansive
state-paper into a human document, and drove it straight to the
human hearts of an injured and insulted people. Under the menace of
disloyalty, Americanism has taken new form and substance; and our
just resentment, like the potter’s wheel, has moulded this force into
lines of strength and resistance. We have seen all we want to see of
“frightfulness” in Europe, all we want to see of injustice, supported
by violence. We are not prepared to welcome any scheme of terrorization
in the interests of a foreign power, or any interference of a foreign
power with our legitimate fields of industry. Such schemes and such
interference constitute an inconceivable affront to the nation. Their
stern and open disavowal is the shibboleth by which our elections may
be purged of treachery, and our well-being confided to good citizenship.
Of all the countries in the world, we and we only have any need to
create artificially the patriotism which is the birthright of other
nations. Into the hearts of six millions of foreign-born men--less than
half of them naturalized--we must infuse that quality of devotion which
will make them place the good of the state above their personal good,
and the safety of the state above their personal safety. It is like
pumping oxygen into six million pairs of lungs for which the common
air is not sufficiently stimulating. We must also keep a watchful eye
upon these men’s wives,--when they are so blessed,--and concentrate
our supreme energy on uncounted millions of children, whose first step
toward patriotism is the acquirement of a common tongue.
We are trying fitfully, but in good faith, to work this civic miracle.
Americanization Day is but one expression of the nation-wide endeavour.
When Cleveland invited all her citizens who had been naturalized within
a twelve-month to assemble and receive a public welcome, to sit on a
platform and be made much of, to listen to national songs and patriotic
speeches, and to take home, every man, a flag and a seal of the city,
she set a good example which will be widely followed. The celebrations
at Riverside, California, and New York City’s Pageant of the Nations
had in view the same admirable end. Sentiment is not a substitute for
duty and discipline; but it has its uses and its field of efficacy.
Such ceremonies perseveringly repeated for twenty years might work a
change in the immigrant population of to-day, were we secure from the
fresh millions which threaten us to-morrow. That the Fourth of July
should be often selected for these rites is perhaps inevitable; it is
a time when patriotism assumes a vivid and popular aspect; but Heaven
forbid that we should rechristen Independence Day, Americanization Day!
However ready we may be to welcome our new citizens, however confident
we may be of their value to the Republic, we are not yet prepared to
give them the place of honour hitherto held by the signers of the
Declaration of Independence. The name which perpetuates the memory of
that deed is a sacred name, and should be preserved no less sacredly
than the national life which was then committed to our keeping.
It is no insult to the immigrant to say that he constitutes one of
the perils of Americanism. How can it be otherwise? Assume that he
is a law-abiding citizen, that he knows nothing of the conspiracies
which have imperilled our safety, that he does not propose to use
his vote in the interests of a foreign power, and that the field of
hyphenated politics has no existence for him. For all these boons
we are sufficiently grateful. But how far does he understand the
responsibilities he assumes with the franchise, how far does he realize
that he has become part of the machinery of the state, and how far
can we depend upon him in our hour of need? He knows, or at least
he has been told, that he may not return home to fight for his own
country, if he seeks American citizenship. He must resist a natural
and a noble impulse as the price of his coveted “papers.” But will
there spring in his heart a noble, though not very natural, impulse to
fight for us if we call our sons to arms? Can we hope that his native
intelligence, unshackled by any working knowledge of our language, will
grasp our national policy and our national obligations; and that--free
from conscription--he will voluntarily risk his life in behalf of a
government for which he has no inheritance of fidelity?
We have opened our doors to unrestricted immigration, partly because
capitalists want plenty of cheap labour, which is not a good reason;
and partly because the immigrants want to come, which is not a
sufficient reason. They also--despite the heart-rending conditions
depicted by Miss Frances Kellor--want to stay. Those who return to the
higher standards of Europe do not materially affect the situation. They
stay, and either surmount their difficulties, or, succumbing to them,
fill our asylums, hospitals, and almshouses. For many years, foreign
economists must have looked with relief at the countless thousands of
derelicts who were supported by the United States instead of by their
own governments. But even the satisfaction we have thus afforded does
not wholly justify our course. Is it worth our while to fill the air
with clamour over eugenics and birth-control, to build barriers around
a marriage license, and to dramatize impassioned pleas for sterility,
when the birthrate of the Republic is nobody’s concern? If the survival
of the fittest means as much to the commonwealth as to the family, why
should we fiddle over pathology while the nation burns?
Miss Kellor is not the only kind-hearted American who holds her
countrymen to blame for the deficiencies of the immigrant. Her point
of view is a common one, and has some foundation in fact. She censures
us even for his dirt, though if she had ever listened to the vitriolic
comments of the police, she might revise her judgment on that score.
“Can’t you _do_ anything?” I once asked a disconsolate guardian of
the peace, who stood on a fine hot day contemplating the forth-flung
garbage of the Israelite. To which he made answer: “Did ye iver thry
to clane out a sthable wid a toothpick?” And as this had not been one
of my life’s endeavours, I offered no further comment. But Miss Kellor
touches a vital truth when she says that Americans will never weld a
mass of heterogeneous humanity into a nation, until they are able to
say what they want that nation to be, and until they are prepared to
follow a policy intelligently outlined. In other words, Americanism
is not a medley of individual theories, partial philanthropies, and
fluid sentiment. A consistent nationalism is essential to civic life,
and we are not dispensed from achieving consistent nationalism by the
difficulties in our way. No multiplication of difficulties makes an
impossibility. Upon what props did the Venetians build the fairest city
of the world?
We cannot in this country hope for the compelling devotion which has
animated Germany; still less for the supreme moral and intellectual
force which is the staying power of France. Mrs. Wharton has best
described the intelligence with which Frenchmen translate their ideals
into doctrine. They know for what they stand in the civilized world,
and the first “white heat of dedication” has hardened into steel-like
endurance. To the simple emotions of men who are defending their homes
from assault have been added the emotions of men who are defending
the world’s noblest inheritance from degradation. “It is the reasoned
recognition of this peril which is making the most intelligent people
in the world the most sublime.”
The problems of England are so closely akin to our own problems, and
her perplexities are so closely akin to our own perplexities, that we
should regard them with insight and with sympathy. We too must pause in
every keen emergency to cajole, to persuade, to placate, to reconcile
conflicting interests, to humour conflicting opinions,--termed by
those who hold them, “principles.” We too must forever bear in mind
the political party which is in power, and the political party which
waits to get into power; and we must pick our way as best we can by the
cross-lights of their abiding hostility. We too must face and overcome
the dough-like resistance of apathy.
I have been told--though I refuse to believe it on hearsay--that
British labourers have asked what difference it would make to them
whether they worked for British or for German masters. It is quite true
that British pacifists and British radicals have not only put this
question, but have answered it, greatly to their own satisfaction, in
American periodicals; but American periodicals are not mouth-pieces
of the British workmen. I make no doubt that if we were fighting
for our lives, there would be found American pacifists and American
radicals writing in British periodicals that no great harm would come
to America if she submitted passively to invasion; and that, whether
their country’s cause were right or wrong, the slaughter of her sons
was a crime, and the wealth of her capitalists was a sufficient reason
for refusing to do battle for her liberty. The painful certainty that
we should never be free from the babbling of treason, any more than
England is free from it now, makes Americanism (the Americanism which
means civic loyalty founded on civic intelligence) shine like a far-off
star on a very dim horizon.
At present, disloyalty founded upon ignorance meets with more attention
than it deserves. Why, after all, should two thousand people assemble
in New York to hear Miss Helen Keller say that, in the event of
invasion, the American workman “has nothing to lose but his chains”? He
has his manhood to lose, and it should mean as much to him as to any
millionaire in the land. What new and debilitating doctrine is this
which holds that personal honour is the exclusive attribute of wealth,
and that a labourer has no more business with it than has a dog! The
fact that Miss Keller has overcome the heavy disabilities which nature
placed in her path, lends interest to her person, but no weight to her
opinions, which give evidence of having been adopted wholesale, and of
having never filtered through any reasoning process of her own. It is
always agreeable to hear her speak about good and simple things. When
she said in Philadelphia that happiness does not lie in pleasure, and
that, although she did not expect to be always pleased, she did expect
to be always happy, by doing what she could to make those about her
happy, we gave our hearty concurrence to sentiments so unexceptionable.
It was the way we ourselves should have liked to feel, and we knew it
was our own fault that we did not. But when in New York she adjured
workingmen never to enter the United States Army, and informed us that
all we needed for adequate defence were shooting-galleries “within
reach of every family,” so that we could all learn--like the old
ladies in “Punch”--to fire a gun, there was something profoundly sad in
words so ill-judged and so fatuous. It cannot be a matter of no moment
that, in the hour of our danger and indecision, thousands of people
stand ready to applaud the disloyal utterances which should affront
every honourable man or woman who hears them.
The “Yale Review” quotes the remark of a “foreigner” that Americans
are always saying, “I don’t care.” The phrase is popular, and sounds
disheartening; but if we spare ourselves concern over trivial things
(if, for example, we were not excited or inflamed by Captain von
Papen’s calling us “idiotic Yankees”), it does not follow that big
issues leave us unmoved. If they did, if they ever should, the word
Americanism might as well be obliterated from the language. The
consistent nationalism for which it stands admits of no indifference.
It is true that the possible peril of New York--as defenceless as a
soft-shell crab, and as succulent--is not an ever-present care to San
Francisco. It is true that San Francisco’s deep anxiety over Japanese
immigration and land-ownership was lightly treated by New York. And
it is true that Denver, sitting in the safety zone, looks down from
her lofty heights without any pressing solicitude about either of her
sister cities. But just as the San Francisco earthquake wrung the heart
of New York, so the first gun fired at New York would arm the citizens
of San Francisco. Only it might then be too late.
The Christmas cartoon of Uncle Sam holding a package marked “Peace
and Prosperity,” and saying with a broad smile, “Just what I wanted!”
was complacent rather than comprehensive. We want peace and we want
prosperity, but they are not all we want; partly because their
permanency depends upon certain props which seem to many of us a
bit unsteady, and partly because we do not, any more than other men,
live by bread alone. The things of the spirit are for us, even as for
heroic and suffering France, of vital worth and import. If we could
say with certainty, “All is gained but honour,” there are still some
of us who would feel our blessings incomplete; but, as it chances, the
contempt meted out to us has taken the palpable form of encroachment
upon our common rights. Until we can protect our industries from
assault and our citizens from butchery, until we can couple disavowal
of past injuries with real assurance of safety in the future, peace
limps, and prosperity is shadowed. With every fresh shock we have
received, with every fresh sorrow we have endured, there has come to
us more and more clearly the vision of a noble nationalism, purged of
“comfort-mongering,” and of perverted sentiment.
Cynical newspaper writers have begun to say that the best way to
make Americans forget one injury is to inflict on them another. This
is hardly a half-truth. The sinking of the Ancona did not obliterate
from our minds the names of the Falaba, the Gulflight, the Frye, the
Hesperian, the Arabic, and the Lusitania. Neither has the sinking of
the Persia buried the Ancona in oblivion. And it is not simple humanity
which has burned these names into the tablets of our memories. The
loss of American lives through the savage torpedoing of liners and
merchant ships might be doubled and trebled any summer day by the
sinking of an excursion steamer, and we should soon forget. A country
which reports eight thousand murders in a single year is not wont to be
deeply stirred by the perils which beset our munition-workers. But when
Americans have gone to their deaths through the violence of another
government, or in the interests of another government, then the
wrong done them is elevated to the importance of a national calamity,
and redress becomes a national obligation. Because we do not wearily
reiterate this patent truth does not mean that we have forgotten it.
If words could save, if words could heal, we should have no fear, nor
shame, nor sorrow. Nothing is less worth while than to go on prattling
about a consistent foreign policy. The corner-stone of civilization is
man’s dependence for protection on the state which he has reared for
his own safety and support.
The concern of Americans for America (I use the word to symbolize
the United States) must be the deep and loyal sentiment which brooks
no injustice and no insult. We have need of many things, but first
and foremost of fidelity. It is a matter of pride and pleasure that
some of our foreign-born citizens should excel in art and letters;
that, under our tutelage, they should learn to design posters, model
statuary, write poems, and make speeches. These things have their
admitted place and value. The encouragement which is given them, the
opportunities which are made for them, the praise which is lavished
upon them, are proofs of our good-will, and of our genuine delight in
fostering ability. But the real significance of the “Americanization”
movement, the summoning of conferences, the promoting of exhibitions,
the bestowing of prizes, is the need we all feel of unification, the
hope we all cherish that, through the influence of congenial work,
immigrants and the children of immigrants will become one in spirit
with the native born. We could make shift to do without the posters and
the symbolic statuary; we could read fewer poems and listen to fewer
speeches; but we cannot possibly do without the loyalty which we have a
right to demand, and which is needful to the safety of the Republic.
For the main thing to be borne in mind is that Americanization does
not mean only an increase of opportunity for the alien, an effort
toward his permanent well-being. It means also service and sacrifice on
his part. This is what citizenship entails, although voters and those
who clamour for the vote seldom take into account such an inexorable
truth. The process of assimilation must go deeper than the polling
booth and the trade union can carry it. Democracy forever teases
us with the contrast between its ideals and its realities, between
its heroic possibilities and its sorry achievements. But it is our
appointed road, and the stones over which we perpetually stumble deny
us the drowsy perils of content. When we read Dr. Eliot’s noble words
in praise of free government and equal opportunities, we know that
his amazing buoyancy does not imply ignorance of primaries, of party
methods, and of graft. With these things he has been familiar all
his life; but the creaking machinery of democracy has never dimmed
his faith in its holiness. Remediable disorders, however grievous
and deep-seated, afford us the comfort of hope, and the privilege of
unending exertion.
To no one ignorant of history can the right of citizenship assume any
real significance. In our country the ballot is so carelessly guarded,
so shamefully misused, that it has become to some men a subject of
derision; to many, an unconsidered trifle; to all, or almost all, an
expression of personal opinion, which, at its best, reflects a popular
newspaper, and, at its worst, stands for nothing less hurtful than
stupidity. A recent contributor to the “Unpopular Review” reminds us
soberly that, as the democratic state cannot rise above the level of
its voters, and as nationality means for us merely the will of the
people, it might not be amiss to guard the franchise with reasonable
solicitude, and to ask something more than unlimited ignorance, and
the absence of a criminal record, as its price. If every man--alien
or native-born--who casts his ballot could be made to know and to feel
that “all the political forces of his country were mainly occupied
for a hundred years in making that act possible,” and that the United
States is, and has always been, the nation of those “who willed to be
Americans,” citizenship might become for us what it was to Rome, what
it is to France,--the exponent of honour, the symbol of self-sacrifice.
A knowledge of history might also prove serviceable in enabling us to
recognize our place and our responsibility among the nations of the
world. No remoteness (geographical remoteness counts for little in
the twentieth century) can sever our interests from the interests of
Europe, or lift from our shoulders the burden of helping to sustain
the collective rights of mankind. We know now that the menace of
frightfulness has overshadowed us. We know that, however cautiously we
picked our steps, we could not, and did not, escape molestation. But
even if we had saved our own skin, if we had suffered no destruction of
property, and if none of our dead lay under the water, the freedom of
Europe, the future of democracy, and the rights of man would be to us
matters of concern.
It is true, moreover, that friendship and alliance with those European
states whose aspirations and ideals respond to our own aspirations
and ideals, are as consistent with Americanism as are friendship and
alliance with the states of South America, which we are now engaged
in loving. It is not from Bolivia, or Chile, or Venezuela, or the
Argentine that we have drawn our best traditions, our law, language,
literature, and art. We extend to these “sister Republics” the arms of
commercial affection; but they have no magic words like Magna Charta
and _le Tiers État_ to stir our souls an inch beyond self-profit. When
we count up our assets, we must reckon heavily on the respect of those
nations which we most respect, and whose good-will in the past is a
guarantee of good-will in the future. It is worth our while, even from
the standpoint of Americanism, to prove our fellowship with humanity,
our care for other interests than our own. The civilization of the
world is the business of all who live in the world. We cannot see it
crashing down, as it crashed in the sinking of the Lusitania and the
Ancona, and content ourselves with asking how many Americans were
drowned. Noble standards, and noble sympathies, and noble sorrows have
their driving power, their practical utility. They have counted heavily
in the destinies of nations. Carthage had commerce. Rome had ideals.
THE END
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS
U · S · A
Transcriber’s Note
A few minor punctuation and spelling errors have been silently
corrected.