ownership in the glorious heritage of American soil, with its rivers,
lakes, mountains, valleys, woods and prairies, and in all its noble
institutions; and he feels that the blessings which he enjoys are not
his by favor or sufferance, but by right;--by moral as well as civil
right. For he took possession of the wilderness, endured the hardships
of the pioneer, contributed his full share toward the grand results
accomplished, and is in mind and heart a true and loyal American
citizen.
JACOB RIIS
Jacob Riis, who may well stand as a representative of the best that
America has received from the Scandinavian countries, was born at
Ribe, Denmark, May 3, 1849. He emigrated to the United States in
1870, where he subsequently obtained a position as reporter on _The
New York Tribune_ and _The Evening Sun_. It is at the close of his
well-known autobiography that he relates how he came to a realization
that he was indeed an American in heart as well as in name. In words
of patriotic fervor he says:--
“I have told the story of the making of an American. There remains to
tell how I found out that he was made and finished at last. It was
when I went back to see my mother once more and, wandering about the
country of my childhood’s memories, had come to the city of Elsinore.
There I fell ill of a fever and lay many weeks in the house of a
friend upon the shore of the beautiful Oeresund. One day when the
fever had left me, they rolled my bed into a room overlooking the
sea. The sunlight danced upon the waves, and the distant mountains of
Sweden were blue against the horizon. Ships passed under full sail
up and down the great waterway of the nations. But the sunshine and
the peaceful day bore no message to me. I lay moodily picking at the
coverlet, sick and discouraged and sore--I hardly knew why myself.
Until all at once there sailed past, close inshore, a ship flying at
the top the flag of freedom, blown out on the breeze till every star
in it shone bright and clear. That moment I knew. Gone were illness,
discouragement, and gloom! Forgotten weakness and suffering, the
cautions of doctor and nurse. I sat up in bed and shouted, laughed
and cried by turns, waving my handkerchief to the flag out there.
They thought I had lost my head, but I told them no, thank God! I
had found it, and my heart, too, at last. I knew then that it was
my flag; that my children’s home was mine, indeed; that I also had
become an American in truth. And I thanked God, and, like unto the
man sick of the palsy, arose from my bed and went home, healed.”
Besides being the author of several books, such as “The Battle
with the Slum,” “How the Other Half Lives,” and “The Children of
the Poor,” dealing with the life of the people of New York’s East
Side, he was an active and practical reformer. In the course of his
struggles to ameliorate the condition of the poor, he met Theodore
Roosevelt and formed the friendship which inspired the volume
represented in the following selection. Riis and Roosevelt had much
in common. There was in both a great deal of the old Anglo-Saxon
fighting spirit, ennobled by modern influences and employed in
defense of right and justice. Their mutual and steadfast devotion
to each other resembled that of ancient liegeman and lord. This
hero-worship is, after all, not unique in our history. It should
be a cause for great pride that so many of our leaders, of whom,
of course, Lincoln is the most striking example, by embodying the
noblest and the best in American life, have been the living ideal of
countless immigrants.
A YOUNG MAN’S HERO: AN IMMIGRANT’S TRIBUTE TO ROOSEVELT
There was never a day that called so loudly for such as he, as does
this of ours. Not that it is worse than other days; I know it is
better. I find proof of it in the very fact that it is as if the
age-long fight between good and evil had suddenly come to a head, as if
all the questions of right, of justice, of the brotherhood, which we
had seen in glimpses before, and dimly, had all at once come out in the
open, craving solution one and all. A battle royal, truly! A battle for
the man of clean hands and clean mind, who can think straight and act
square; the man who will stand for the right “because it is right”; who
can say, and mean it, that “it is hard to fail, but worse never to have
tried to succeed.” A battle for him who strives for “that highest form
of success which comes, not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but
to him who does not shrink from danger, from hardship or from bitter
toil, and who out of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph.” I am
but quoting his own words, and never, I think, did I hear finer than
those he spoke of Governor Taft when he had put by his own preferences
and gone to his hard and toilsome task in the Philippines; for the
whole royal, fighting soul of the man was in them.
“But he undertook it gladly,” he said, “and he is to be considered
thrice fortunate; for in this world the one thing supremely worth
having is the opportunity coupled with the capacity to do well and
worthily a piece of work the doing of which is of vital consequence to
the welfare of mankind.”
There is his measure. Let now the understrappers sputter. With that for
our young men to grow up to, we need have no fear for the morrow. Let
it ask what questions it will of the Republic, it shall answer them,
for we shall have men at the oars.
This afternoon the newspaper that came to my desk contained a cable
despatch which gave me a glow at the heart such as I have not felt for
a while. Just three lines; but they told that a nation’s conscience
was struggling victoriously through hate and foul play and treason:
Captain Dreyfus was to get a fair trial. Justice was to be done at
last to a once despised Jew whose wrongs had held the civilized world
upon the rack; and the world was made happy. Say now it does not
move! It does, where there are men to move it,--I said it before: men
who believe in the right and are willing to fight for it. When the
children of poverty and want came to Mulberry Street for justice, and
I knew they came because Roosevelt had been there, I saw in that what
the resolute, courageous, unyielding determination of one man to see
right done in his own time could accomplish. I have watched him since
in the Navy Department, in camp, as Governor, in the White House, and
more and more I have made out his message as being to the young men
of our day, himself the youngest of our Presidents. I know it is so,
for when I speak to the young about him, I see their eyes kindle, and
their handshake tells me that they want to be like him, and are going
to try. And then I feel that I, too, have done something worth doing
for my people. For, whether for good or for evil, we all leave our mark
upon our day, and his is that of a clean, strong man who fights for the
right _and wins_.
Now, then, a word to these young men who, all over our broad land, are
striving up toward the standard he sets, for he is their hero by right,
as he is mine. Do not be afraid to own it. The struggle to which you
are born, and in which you are bound to take a hand if you would be men
in more than name, is the struggle between the ideal and the husk; for
life without ideals is like the world without the hope of heaven, an
empty, meaningless husk. It is your business to read its meaning into
it by making the ideals real. The material things of life are good in
their day, but they pass away; the moral remain to bear witness that
the high hopes of youth are not mere phantasms. Theodore Roosevelt
_lives his ideals_; therefore you can trust them. Here they are in
working shape: “Face the facts as you find them; strive steadily for
the best.” “Be never content with less than the possible best, and
never throw away the possible best because it is not the ideal best.”
Maxims, those, for the young man who wants to make the most of himself
and his time. Happily for the world, the young man who does not is
rare.
JACOB VAN DER ZEE
“The Hollanders of Iowa,” by Jacob Van der Zee, was published at Iowa
City in 1912 by the State Historical Society of Iowa. The following
facts regarding the author and his book are given in the introduction
of the editor, Mr. Benjamin F. Shambaugh:--
“The author of this volume on ‘The Hollanders of Iowa’ was admirably
fitted for the task. Born of Dutch parents in The Netherlands and
reared among kinsfolk in Iowa, he has been a part of the life which
is portrayed in these pages. At the same time Mr. Van der Zee’s
education at The State University of Iowa, his three years’ residence
at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, and his research work in The State
Historical Society of Iowa have made it possible for him to study the
Hollanders objectively as well as subjectively. Accordingly, his book
is in no respect an overdrawn, eulogistic account of the Dutch people.
“The history of the Hollanders of Iowa is not wholly provincial:
it suggests much that is typical in the development of Iowa and in
the larger history of the West: it is ‘a story of the stubborn and
unyielding fight of men and women who overcame the obstacles of a new
country and handed down to their descendants thriving farms and homes
of peace and plenty.’”
The selection here given comprises chapter four of the book.
WHY DUTCH EMIGRANTS TURNED TO AMERICA
Such was the condition of things in The Netherlands that thousands
of people lived from hand to mouth, the prey of poverty and hunger,
stupefied by the hopelessness of securing the necessities of life, and
barely enabled through the gifts of the well-to-do to drag out their
wretched lives. At the same time many of these unfortunate persons were
hopeful and eager to find a place where they might obtain a livelihood,
lead quiet lives of honesty and godliness, and educate their children
in the principles of religion without let or hindrance. The leaders of
the Separatists looked forward to a life of freedom in a land where
man would not have to wait for work, but where work awaited man, where
people would not rub elbows by reason of the density of population, and
where God’s creation would welcome the coming of man.
When social forces such as these, mostly beyond human control, began
to operate with increasing power, the Dutch people were not slow to
recognize the truth that emigration was absolutely necessary. The
seriousness of the situation dawned upon all thinking men,--especially
upon state officials, who feared that unless the stream of emigration
could be directed toward the Dutch colonies, their country would suffer
an enormous drain of capital and human lives. Accordingly the attention
of prospective emigrants was called to the Dutch East Indies,--chiefly
to the advantages of the rich island of Java, “that paradise of the
world, the pearl in Holland’s crown.”
The religion of the Dissenters, however, was responsible for turning
the balance in favor of some other land. To them Java was a closed
door. Beside the fear of an unhealthful climate towered the certainty
of legislation hostile to their Christian principles and ideals.
Moreover, could poor men afford the expense of transportation thither,
and could they feel assured of getting land or work in Java? State
officials, men of learning, and men of business from several parts
of the country were summoned to an important conference at Amsterdam
to discuss the whole emigration movement. The Separatist leaders were
asked why they should not remain Netherlanders under the House of
Orange by removing to the colonies just as the people of the British
Isles found homes in the English colonies. Two Separatist ministers
appealed to the government to direct the flood of emigration toward
Java by promises of civil and religious liberty. But the attempt to
secure a free Christian colony in Java produced only idle expectations.
Then it was that the people turned their eyes away from the East
toward the United States of North America,--a land of freedom and rich
blessings, where they hoped to find in its unsettled interior some
spot adaptable to agriculture, and thus rescue themselves from the
miseries of a decadent state. To the discontented, ambitious Hollander
was presented the picture of a real land of promise, where all things
would smile at him and be prepared, as it were, to aid him. It was
said that “after an ocean passage of trifling expense the Netherlander
may find work to do as soon as he sets foot on shore; he may buy land
for a few florins per acre; and feel secure and free among a people
of Dutch, German and English birth, who will rejoice to see him come
to increase the nation’s wealth.” Asserting that they could vouch for
the truthfulness of this picture, as based on the positive assurances
and experiences of friends already in America, the Separatist
clergyman-pamphleteers openly declared that they would not hesitate
to rob Holland of her best citizens by helping them on their way to
America.
Of the people and government of the United States, Scholte, who was
destined to lead hundreds of his countrymen to the State of Iowa, at an
early date cherished a highly favorable opinion, which he expressed as
follows:--
“I am convinced that a settlement in some healthful region there will
have, by the ordinary blessing of God, excellent temporal and moral
results, especially for the rising generation.... Should it then excite
much wonder that I have firmly resolved to leave The Netherlands and
together with so many Christian relatives adopt the United States as a
new fatherland?
“There I shall certainly meet with the same wickedness which troubles
me here; yet I shall find also opportunity to work. There I shall
certainly find the same, if not still greater, evidence of unbelief and
superstition; but I shall also find a constitutional provision which
does not bind my hands in the use of the Sword of the Spirit, which is
the Word of God; there I can fight for what I believe without being
disobedient to the magistrates and authorities ordained by God. There I
shall find among men the same zeal to obtain this world’s goods; but I
shall not find the same impulse to get the better of one another, for
competition is open to all; I shall not find the same desire to reduce
the wages of labor, nor the same inducement to avoid taxation, nor the
same peevishness and groaning about the burden of taxation.
“There I shall find no Minister of Public Worship, for the separation
of Church and State is a fact. There I shall not need to contribute
to the support of pastors whose teachings I abhor. I shall find no
school commissions nor school supervisors who prohibit the use of the
Bible in schools and hinder the organization of special schools, for
education is really free. I shall find there the descendants of earlier
inhabitants of Holland, among whom the piety of our forefathers still
lives, and who are now prepared to give advice and aid to Hollanders
who are forced to come to them.”
Scholte, however, never claimed to be a refugee from the oppression
of the Old World. He left Europe because the social, religious, and
political condition of his native country was such that, according to
his conviction, he could not with any reasonable hope of success work
for the actual benefit of honest and industrious fellow-men. Very many
members of Scholte’s emigrant association felt certain that they and
their children would sink from the middle class and end their lives as
paupers, if they remained in Holland.
Later emigration to America was in no small degree due to a cause which
has always operated in inducing people to abandon their European homes.
After a period of residence in America, Hollanders, elated by reason
of their prosperity and general change of fortune, very naturally
reported their delight to friends and relatives in the fatherland,
strongly urging them to come and share their good luck instead of
suffering from want in Holland. They wrote of higher wages, fertile
soil, cheapness of the necessities of life, abundance of cheap land,
and many other advantages. If one’s wages for a day’s work in America
equalled a week’s earnings in Holland, surely it was worth while to
leave that unfortunate country. Such favorable reports as these were
largely instrumental in turning the attention of Hollanders to the New
World as the one great land of opportunity.
EDWARD BOK
Although it was impossible to include in this volume selections from
“The Americanization of Edward Bok,” recently published, it seems
that some mention should be made of this delightfully reminiscent
autobiography and of its author, who came to this country in 1870 as
a little Dutch boy of six years.
There are entertaining chapters on his passion for collecting
autographs from famous people, on his visit to Boston and Cambridge
to see Holmes and Longfellow and Emerson, on his relations with
prominent statesmen and other notable men of his time, and on his
experiences as editor of an influential and successful magazine; but
most pertinent to the purpose of this work are the last two chapters
of the book, “Where America Fell Short with Me,” and “What I Owe to
America,” which should be read by all those actively interested in
the Americanization of the foreign-born. In the first of these he
points out that America failed to teach him thrift or economy; that
the importance of doing a task thoroughly, the need of quality rather
than quantity, was not inculcated; that the public school fell short
in its responsibility of seeing that he, a foreign-born boy, acquired
the English language correctly; that he was not impressed with a
wholesome and proper respect for law and authority; and that, at the
most critical time, when he came to exercise the right of suffrage,
the State offered him no enlightenment or encouragement. Yet, in
spite of all this, he is able to say: “Whatever shortcomings I may
have found during my fifty-year period of Americanization; however
America may have failed to help my transition from a foreigner into
an American, I owe to her the most priceless gift that any nation can
offer, and that is opportunity.”
OSCAR SOLOMON STRAUS
Oscar S. Straus, formerly United States Ambassador to Turkey, was
born in Bavaria. Besides the degree A.B. from Columbia University,
he has received honorary degrees from various institutions. He was
appointed a member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The
Hague, 1902, and Secretary of Commerce and Labor in the cabinet of
President Roosevelt, and has held many other prominent positions in
civil and political affairs.
His chief writings are: “The Origin of Republican Form of Government
in the United States,” 1886; “Roger Williams, the Pioneer of
Religious Liberty,” 1894; “The American Spirit,” a collection of
various addresses, published in one volume by the Century Company
in 1893. The address selected for quotation here is that delivered
at the banquet of the American Hebrew Congregations, in New York,
January 18, 1911.
AMERICA AND THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN JUDAISM
The spirit of American Judaism first asserted itself when Stuyvesant,
the Governor of New Amsterdam, would not permit the few Jews who had
emigrated from Portugal to unite with the other burghers in standing
guard for the protection of their homes. When the tax-collector came to
Asser Levy to demand a tax on this account, he asked whether that tax
was imposed on all the residents of New Amsterdam. “No,” was the reply,
“it is only imposed upon the Jews, because they do not stand guard!”
“I have not asked to be exempted,” replied Asser Levy. “I am not only
willing, but I demand the right to stand guard.” That right the Jews
have asserted and exercised as officers in the ranks of the Continental
Army and in every crisis of our national history from that time until
the present day.
The American spirit and the spirit of American Judaism were nurtured
in the same cradle of Liberty, and were united in origin, in ideals,
and in historical development. The closing chapter of the chronicles of
the Jews on the Iberian peninsula forms the opening chapter of their
history on this Continent. It was Luis Santangel, “the Beaconsfield of
his time,” assisted by his kinsman Gabriel Sanches, the Royal Treasurer
of Aragon, who advanced out of his own purse seventeen thousand florins
which made the voyages of Columbus possible. Luis de Torres, the
interpreter as well as the surgeon and the physician of the little
fleet, and several of the sailors who were with Columbus on his first
voyage, as shown by the record, were Jews.
Looking back through this vista of more than four centuries, we have
reason to remember with justified gratitude the foresight and signal
services of those Spanish Jews who had the wisdom to divine the
far-reaching possibilities of the plans of the great navigator, whom
the King and the Queen, the Dukes and the Grandees united in regarding
as merely “a visionary babbler” or, worse than this, as “a scheming
adventurer.” The royal patrons were finally won over by the hope that
Columbus might discover new treasures of gold and precious stones to
enrich the Spanish crown. But not so with the Jewish patrons, who
caused Columbus, or, as he was then called, Christopher Colon, to be
recalled, and who, without security and without interest, advanced
the money to fit out his caravels, since they saw, as by divine
inspiration, the promise and possibility of the discovery of another
world, which, in the words of the late Emilio Castelar--the historian,
statesman, and one time President of Spain--“would afford to the
quickening principles of human liberty a temple reared to the God
of enfranchised and redeemed conscience, a land that would offer an
unstained abode to the ideals of progress.” Fortunately, the records of
these transactions are still preserved in the archives of Simancas in
Seville.
It is idle to speculate upon hypothetical theories in the face of
the facts of history. Of course, America would have been discovered
and colonized had Columbus never lived; but had the streams of the
beginnings of American history flown from other sources in other
directions, it would be futile even to make an imaginative forecast of
the effect they would have produced upon the history and development of
this Continent. The merciless intolerance of an ecclesiastical system
and the horror of its persecutions stimulated the earliest immigration,
and subsequently brought about the Reformation in Saxon and Anglo-Saxon
lands, and the same spirit drove to our shores the Pilgrim and the
Puritan fathers; which chain of circumstances destined this country
from the very beginning to be the land of the immigrant and a home for
the fugitive and the persecuted.
The difference between government by kings and nobles and government
under a Democracy is, that the former rests upon the power to compel
obedience, while the latter rests essentially upon the sacrifice by
the individual for the community, based upon the ideals of right and
justice. If the Pilgrims, the Puritans, and the Huguenots brought with
them, as they certainly did, the remembrance of sufferings for ideals
and the spirit of sacrifice, how much longer was that remembrance, and
with how much greater intensity did that spirit glow in the souls of
the Jews, whose whole history is a record of martyrdom, of suffering,
and of sacrifice for the ideals of civil and religious liberty;
concerning whom it has been said: “Of all the races and nations of
mankind which quarter the arms of Liberty on the shields of their
honor, none has a better title to that decoration than the Jews.”
The spirit of Judaism became the mother spirit of Puritanism in Old
England; and the history of Israel and its democratic model under the
Judges inspired and guided the Pilgrims and the Puritans in their
wandering hither and in laying the foundation of their commonwealths in
New England. The piety and learning of the Jews bridged the chasm of
the Middle Ages; and the torch they bore amidst trials and sufferings
lighted the pathway from the ancient to the modern world.