Darmesteter, “is exhausted neither by Judaism nor by Christianity, and
they hold a reserve force for the benefit of the coming century. The
twentieth century is better prepared than the nineteen preceding it to
understand them.” While Zionism is a pious hope and a vision out of
despair in countries where the victims of oppression are still counted
by millions, the republicanism of the United States is the nearest
approach to the ideals of the prophets of Israel that ever has been
incorporated in the form of a state. The founders of our government
converted the dreams of philosophers into a political system,--a
government by the people, for the people, whereunder the rights of
man became the rights of men, secured and guaranteed by a written
constitution. Ours is peculiarly a promised land wherein the spirit of
the teachings of the ancient prophets inspired the work of the fathers
of our country.
American liberty demands of no man the abandonment of his conscientious
convictions; on the contrary, it had its birth, not in the narrowness
of uniformity, but in the breadth of diversity, which patriotism fuses
together into a conscious harmony for the highest welfare of all. The
Protestant, the Catholic, and the Jew, each and all need the support
and the sustaining power of their religion to develop their moral
natures and to keep alive the spirit of self-sacrifice which American
patriotism demands of every man, whatever may be his creed or race, who
is worthy to enjoy the blessings of American citizenship.
I do not wish to be misunderstood as claiming any special merit for
the Jews as American citizens which is not equally possessed by the
Americans of other creeds. They have the good as well as the bad among
them, the noble and the ignoble, the worthy and the unworthy. They have
the qualities as well as the defects of their fellow-citizens. In a
word, they are not any less patriotic Americans because they are Jews,
nor any less loyal Jews because they are primarily patriotic Americans.
The Jew is neither a newcomer nor an alien in this country or on this
continent; his Americanism is as original and ancient as that of any
race or people with the exception of the American Indian and other
aborigines. He came in the caravels of Columbus, and he knocked at the
gates of New Amsterdam only thirty-five years after the Pilgrim Fathers
stepped ashore on Plymouth Rock.
FELIX ADLER
Felix Adler, lecturer and writer on moral and ethical subjects, was
born in Alzey, Germany, in 1851. He received the degree A.B. from
Columbia University, and continued his studies at Berlin and at the
University of Heidelberg. From 1874 to 1876 he was professor of
Hebrew at Cornell University. Since 1902 he has been professor of
political and social ethics at Columbia. He has produced numerous
works on moral and ethical topics. In 1915 there was published his
book, “The World Crisis and its Meaning,” the third chapter of which
is here quoted in part.
Adler’s keen interest in international ethics has been expressed in
several addresses delivered before the New York Society of Ethical
Culture, which was founded by him in 1876. Among other things he
pleads for altruism among the nations, and truthfulness, and believes
in a purified nationalism instead of anti- or inter-nationalism.
THE AMERICAN IDEAL
The American ideal is that of the uncommon quality latent in the common
man. Necessarily it is an ethical ideal, a spiritual ideal; otherwise
it would be nonsense. For, taking men as they are, they are assuredly
not equal. The differences between them, on the contrary, are glaring.
The common man is not uncommonly fine spiritually, but rather, seen
from the outside, “uncommonly” common. It is therefore an ethical
instinct that has turned the people toward this ethical conception.
It is true that in Germany and in England, side by side with the
efficiency and the mastery ideals, there has always existed this same
spiritual or religious ideal; side by side with the stratification
and entitulation of men, the labelling of them as lower and higher,
as empirically better or worse, there has always been the recognition
that men are equal,--equal, that is to say, in church, but not
outside, equal in the hereafter, but not in this life. If we would
fathom the real depth and inner significance of the democratic ideal
as it slumbers or dreams in the heart of America, rather than as yet
explicit, we must say that it is an ideal which seeks to overcome this
very dualism, seeks to take the spiritual conception of human equality
out of the church and put it into the market place, to take it from
far off celestial realms for realization upon this earth. For men are
not equal in the empirical sense; they are equal only in the spiritual
sense, equal only in the sense that the margin of achievement of which
any person is capable, be it wide or narrow, is infinitesimal compared
with his infinite spiritual possibilities.
It is because of this subconscious ethical motive that there is this
generous air of expectation in America, that we are always wondering
what will happen next, or who will happen next. Will another Emerson
come along? Will another Lincoln come along? We do not know. But this
we know, that the greatest lusters of our past already tend to fade in
our memory, not because we are irreverent, but because nothing that
the past has accomplished can content us; because we are looking for
greatness beyond greatness, truth beyond truth ever yet spoken. The
Germans have a legend that in their hour of need an ancient emperor
will arise out of the tomb where he slumbers to stretch his protecting
hand over the Fatherland. We Americans, too, have the belief that, if
ever such an hour comes for us, there will arise spirits clothed in
human flesh amongst us sufficient for our need, but spirits that will
come, as it were, out of the future to meet our advancing host and lead
it, not ghosts out of the storied past. For America differs from all
other nations in that it derives its inspiration from the future. Every
other people has some culture, some civilization, handed down from the
past, of which it is the custodian, and which it seeks to develop. The
American people have no such single tradition. They are dedicated, not
to the preservation of what has been, but to the creation of what never
has been. They are the prophets of the future, not the priests of the
past.
I have spoken above of ideals, of what is fine in a nation, of fine
tendencies. The idea which a people has of itself, like the idea which
an individual has of himself, often does not tally with the reality. If
we look at the realities of American life,--and, on the principle of
_corruptio optimi pessima_, we should be prepared for what we see,--we
are dismayed to observe in actual practice what seems like a monstrous
caricature,--not democracy, but plutocracy; kings expelled and the
petty political bosses in their stead; merciless exploitation of the
economically weak,--a precipitate reduction of wages, for instance,
at the first signs of approaching depression, in advance of what is
required,--instead of respect for the sacred personality of human
beings, the utmost disrespect. Certainly the nation needs strong and
persistent ethical teaching in order to make it aware of its better
self and of what is implied in the political institutions which it has
founded.
But ethical teaching alone will not suffice. It must be admitted
that a danger lurks in the idea of equality itself. The danger is
that differences in refinement, in culture, in intellectual ability
and attainments are apt to be insufficiently emphasized; that the
untutored, the uncultivated, the intellectually undeveloped, are apt
presumptuously to put themselves on a par with those of superior
development; and hence that superiority, failing to meet with
recognition, will be discouraged and democracy tend to level men
downward instead of upward. This will not be true so much of such moral
excellence as appears in an Emerson or a Lincoln,--for there is that
in the lowliest which responds to the manifestations of transcendent
moral beauty,--but it will hold good of those minor superiorities that
fall short of the highest in art and science and conduct, yet upon the
fostering of which depends the eventual appearance of culture’s richest
fruits.
In order to ward off this danger we must have a new and larger
educational policy in our schools than has yet been put in practice.
Vocational training in its broadest and deepest sense will be our
greatest aid.
Democracy, the American democracy, is the St. Christopher. St.
Christopher bore the Christ child on his shoulders as he stepped into
the river, and the child was as light as a feather. But it became
heavier and heavier as he entered the stream, until he was well nigh
borne down by it. So we, in the heyday of 1776, stepped into the stream
with the infant Democracy on our shoulders, and it was light as a
feather’s weight; but it is becoming heavier and heavier the deeper we
are getting into the stream--heavier and heavier. When we began, there
were four or five millions. Now there are ninety millions. Heavier
and heavier! And there are other millions coming. When we began we
were a homogeneous people; now there are those twenty-three languages
spoken in a single school. And with this vast multitude, and this
heterogeneous population, we are trying the most difficult experiment
that has ever been attempted in the world,--trying to invest with
sovereignty the common man. There has been the sovereignty of kings,
and now and then a king has done well. There has been the sovereignty
of aristocracies, and now and then an English aristocracy or a Venetian
aristocracy has done well--though never wholly well. And now we are
imposing this most difficult task of government, which depends on the
recognition of excellence in others, so that the best may rule in our
behalf, on the shoulders of the multitude. These are our difficulties.
But our difficulties are also our opportunities. This land is the
Promised Land. It is that not only in the sense in which the word
is commonly taken--that is to say, a haven for the disadvantaged of
other countries, a land whither the oppressed may come to repair
their fortunes and breathe freely and achieve material independence.
That is but one side of the promise. In that sense the Anglo-American
native population is the host, extending hospitality, the benefactor
of the immigrants. But this is also the land of promise for the native
population themselves, in order that they may be penetrated by the
influence of what is best in the newcomers, in order that their too
narrow horizon may be widened, in order that their stiffened mental
bent may become more flexible; that festivity, pageant and song may be
added to their life by the newcomers; that echoes of ancient prophecy
may inspire the matter-of-fact, progressive movements, so-called, of
our day.
America is the Wonderland, hid for ages in the secret of the sea,
then revealed. At first, how abused! Spanish conquerors trampled it;
it was the nesting place of buccaneers, adventurers, if also the home
of the Puritans--bad men and good men side by side. Then for dreary
centuries the home of slavery. Then the scene of prolonged strife. And
now, on the surface, the stamping ground of vulgar plutocrats! And yet,
in the hearts of the elect,--yes, and in the hearts of the masses,
too,--inarticulate and dim, there has ever been present a fairer and
nobler ideal, the ideal of a Republic built on the uncommon fineness
in the common man! To live for that ideal is the true Americanism, the
larger patriotism. To that ideal, not on the field of battle, as in
Europe, but in the arduous toil of peace, let us be willing to give the
“last full measure of devotion.”
MARY ANTIN
With the publication in 1912 of Mary Antin’s “The Promised Land,” a
new interest was awakened in the experiences of the foreign-born,
and since then several important autobiographies of immigrants have
appeared.
Miss Antin, who was born in Polotzk, Russia, in 1881, and came to
America in 1894, was educated in the public schools of Boston, later
attending Teachers’ College and Barnard College, Columbia University.
Many an American boy and girl is familiar with her fine tribute to
the part of the public school in her Americanization.
In 1914 she published “They Who Knock at Our Gates,” “a complete
gospel of immigration,” in which she aims to refute the material
and selfish arguments of the restrictionists, basing her plea for
a nobler and more liberal treatment of the immigration question
upon the fundamental principles of the Declaration of Independence.
It is from this volume and “The Promised Land” that the following
selections are taken.
AN IMMIGRANT’S TRIBUTE TO THE PUBLIC SCHOOL AND TO GEORGE WASHINGTON
The public school has done its best for us foreigners, and for the
country, when it has made us into good Americans. I am glad it is mine
to tell how the miracle was wrought in one case. You should be glad
to hear of it, you born Americans; for it is the story of the growth
of your country; of the flocking of your brothers and sisters from
the far ends of the earth to the flag you love; of the recruiting of
your armies of workers, thinkers, and leaders. And you will be glad to
hear of it, my comrades in adoption; for it is a rehearsal of your own
experience, the thrill and wonder of which your own hearts have felt.
How long would you say, wise reader, it takes to make an American? By
the middle of my second year in school I had reached the sixth grade.
When, after the Christmas holidays, we began to study the life of
Washington, running through a summary of the Revolution, and the early
days of the Republic, it seemed to me that all my reading and study had
been idle until then. The reader, the arithmetic, the song book, that
had so fascinated me until now, became suddenly sober exercise books,
tools wherewith to hew a way to the source of inspiration. When the
teacher read to us out of a big book with many bookmarks in it, I sat
rigid with attention in my little chair, my hands tightly clasped on
the edge of my desk; and I painfully held my breath, to prevent sighs
of disappointment escaping, as I saw the teacher skip the parts between
bookmarks. When the class read, and it came my turn, my voice shook and
the book trembled in my hands. I could not pronounce the name of George
Washington without a pause. Never had I prayed, never had I chanted the
songs of David, never had I called upon the Most Holy, in such utter
reverence and worship as I repeated the simple sentences of my child’s
story of the patriot. I gazed with adoration at the portraits of George
and Martha Washington, till I could see them with my eyes shut. And
whereas formerly my self-consciousness had bordered on conceit, and
I thought myself an uncommon person, parading my schoolbooks through
the streets, and swelling with pride when a teacher detained me in
conversation, now I grew humble all at once, seeing how insignificant I
was beside the Great.
As I read about the noble boy who would not tell a lie to save
himself from punishment, I was for the first time truly repentant
of my sins. Formerly I had fasted and prayed and made sacrifice on
the Day of Atonement, but it was more than half play, in mimicry of
my elders. I had no real horror of sin, and I knew so many ways of
escaping punishment. I am sure my family, my neighbors, my teachers
in Polotzk--all my world, in fact--strove together, by example and
precept, to teach me goodness. Saintliness had a new incarnation in
about every third person I knew. I did respect the saints, but I could
not help seeing that most of them were a little bit stupid, and that
mischief was much more fun than piety. Goodness, as I had known it,
was respectable, but not necessarily admirable. The people I really
admired, like my Uncle Solomon and Cousin Rachel, were those who
preached the least and laughed the most. My sister Frieda was perfectly
good, but she did not think the less of me because I played tricks.
What I loved in my friends was not inimitable. One could be downright
good if one really wanted to. One could be learned if one had books and
teachers. One could sing funny songs and tell anecdotes if one traveled
about and picked up such things, like one’s uncles and cousins. But a
human being strictly good, perfectly wise, and unfailingly valiant,
all at the same time, I had never heard or dreamed of. This wonderful
George Washington was as inimitable as he was irreproachable. Even if
I had never, never told a lie, I could not compare myself to George
Washington; for I was not brave,--I was afraid to go out when snowballs
whizzed,--and I could never be the First President of the United States.
So I was forced to revise my own estimate of myself. But the twin of
my new-born humility, paradoxical as it may seem, was a sense of
dignity I had never known before. For if I found that I was a person
of small consequence, I discovered at the same time that I was more
nobly related than I had ever supposed. I had relatives and friends
who were notable people by the old standards,--and I had never been
ashamed of my family,---but this George Washington, who died long
before I was born, was like a king in greatness, and he and I were
Fellow-Citizens. There was a great deal about Fellow-Citizens in the
patriotic literature we read at this time; and I knew from my father
how he was a Citizen through the process of naturalization, and how I
also was a Citizen by virtue of my relation to him. Undoubtedly I was
a Fellow-Citizen, and George Washington was another. It thrilled me to
realize what sudden greatness had fallen on me, and at the same time
sobered me, as with a sense of responsibility. I strove to conduct
myself as befitted a Fellow-Citizen.
Before books came into my life, I was given to stargazing and
daydreaming. When books were given me, I fell upon them as a glutton
pounces on his meat after a period of enforced starvation. I lived with
my nose in a book, and took no notice of the alterations of the sun and
stars. But now, after the advent of George Washington and the American
Revolution, I began to dream again. I strayed on the Common after
school instead of hurrying home to read. I hung on fence rails, my
pet book forgotten under my arm, and gazed off to the yellow-streaked
February sunset, and beyond, and beyond. I was no longer the central
figure of my dreams; the dry weeds in the lane crackled beneath the
tread of Heroes.
What more could America give a child? Ah, much more! As I read how
the patriots planned the Revolution, and the women gave their sons
to die in battle, and the heroes led to victory, and the rejoicing
people set up the Republic, it dawned on me gradually what was meant by
_my country_. The people all desiring noble things, and striving for
them together, defying their oppressors, giving their lives for each
other,--all this it was that made _my country_. It was not a thing
that I _understood_; I could not go home and tell Frieda about it, as I
told her other things I learned at school. But I knew one could say “my
country” and _feel_ it, as one felt “God” or “myself.” My teacher, my
schoolmates, Miss Dillingham, George Washington himself, could not mean
more than I when they said “my country,” after I had once felt it. For
the Country was for all the Citizens, and _I was a citizen_. And when
we stood up to sing “America,” I shouted the words with all my might. I
was in very earnest proclaiming to the world my love for my new-found
country.
“I love thy rocks and rills,
Thy woods and templed hills.”
Boston Harbor, Crescent Beach, Chelsea Square,--all was hallowed ground
to me. As the day approached when the school was to hold exercises in
honor of Washington’s Birthday, the halls resounded at all hours with
the strains of patriotic songs; and I, who was a model of the attentive
pupil, more than once lost my place in the lesson as I strained to
hear, through closed doors, some neighboring class rehearsing “The
Star-Spangled Banner.” If the doors happened to open, and the chorus
broke out unveiled,--
“O! say, does that Star-Spangled Banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free, and the home of the brave?”
delicious tremors ran up and down my spine, and I was faint with
suppressed enthusiasm.
Where had been my country until now? What flag had I loved? What
heroes had I worshipped? The very names of these things had been
unknown to me. Well I knew that Polotzk was not my country. It was
_goluth_--exile. On many occasions in the year we prayed to God to lead
us out of exile. The beautiful Passover service closed with the words,
“Next year, may we be in Jerusalem.” On childish lips, indeed, those
words were no conscious aspiration; we repeated the Hebrew syllables
after our elders, but without their hope and longing. Still not a
child among us was too young to feel in his own flesh the lash of the
oppressor. We knew what it was to be Jews in exile, from the spiteful
treatment we suffered at the hands of the smallest urchin who crossed
himself; and thence we knew that Israel had good reason to pray for
deliverance. But the story of the Exodus was not history to me in the
sense that the story of the American Revolution was. It was more like a
glorious myth, a belief in which had the effect of cutting me off from
the actual world, by linking me with a world of phantoms. Those moments
of exaltation which the contemplation of the Biblical past afforded
us, allowing us to call ourselves the children of princes, served
but to tinge with a more poignant sense of disinheritance the long
humdrum stretches of our life. In very truth we were a people without
a country. Surrounded by mocking foes and detractors, it was difficult
for me to realize the persons of my people’s heroes or the events in
which they moved. Except in moments of abstraction from the world
around me, I scarcely understood that Jerusalem was an actual spot on
the earth, where once the Kings of the Bible, real people, like my
neighbors in Polotzk, ruled in puissant majesty. For the conditions of
our civil life did not permit us to cultivate a spirit of nationalism.
The freedom of worship that was grudgingly granted within the narrow
limits of the Pale by no means included the right to set up openly
any ideal of a Hebrew State, any hero other than the Czar. What we
children picked up of our ancient political history was confused with
the miraculous story of the Creation, with the supernatural legends and
hazy associations of Bible lore. As to our future, we Jews in Polotzk
had no national expectations; only a life-worn dreamer here and there
hoped to die in Palestine. If Fetchke and I sang, with my father, first
making sure of our audience, “Zion, Zion, Holy Zion, not forever is it
lost,” we did not really picture to ourselves Judæa restored.
So it came to pass that we did not know what _my country_ could mean
to a man. And as we had no country, so we had no flag to love. It was
by no far-fetched symbolism that the banner of the House of Romanoff
became the emblem of our latter-day bondage in our eyes. Even a child
would know how to hate the flag that we were forced, on pain of severe
penalties, to hoist above our housetops, in celebration of the advent
of one of our oppressors. And as it was with country and flag, so it
was with heroes of war. We hated the uniform of the soldier, to the
last brass button. On the person of a Gentile, it was the symbol of
tyranny; on the person of a Jew, it was the emblem of shame.
So a little Jewish girl in Polotzk was apt to grow up hungry-minded
and empty-hearted; and if, still in her outreaching youth, she was set
down in a land of outspoken patriotism, she was likely to love her
new country with a great love, and to embrace its heroes in a great
worship. Naturalization, with us Russian Jews, may mean more than the
adoption of the immigrant by America. It may mean the adoption of
America by the immigrant.
THE LAW OF THE FATHERS: A VIEW OF THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE