not answer me promptly, “That which is contained in the Declaration of
Independence,” I put him down for a poor citizen. He who is ignorant
of the law is likely to disobey it. And there cannot be two minds
about the position of the Declaration among our documents of State.
What the Mosaic Law is to the Jews, the Declaration is to the American
people. It affords us a starting-point in history and defines our
mission among the nations. Without it, we should not differ greatly
from other nations who achieved a constitutional form of government and
various democratic institutions. What marks us out from other advanced
nations is the origin of our liberties in one supreme act of political
innovation, prompted by a conscious sense of the dignity of manhood. In
other countries advances have been made by favor of hereditary rulers
and aristocratic parliaments, each successive reform being grudgingly
handed down to the people from above. Not so in America. At one bold
stroke we shattered the monarchical tradition, and installed the people
in the seats of government, substituting the gospel of the sovereignty
of the masses for the superstition of the divine right of kings.
And even more notable than the boldness of the act was the dignity
with which it was entered upon. In terms befitting a philosophical
discourse, we gave notice to the world that what we were about to do,
we would do in the name of humanity, in the conviction that as justice
is the end of government, so should manhood be its source.
It is this insistence on the philosophic sanction of our revolt that
gives the sublime touch to our political performance. Up to the moment
of our declaration of independence, our struggle with our English
rulers did not differ from other popular struggles against despotic
governments. Again and again we respectfully petitioned for redress
of specific grievances, as the governed, from time immemorial, have
petitioned their governors. But one day we abandoned our suit for
petty damages, and instituted a suit for the recovery of our entire
human heritage of freedom; and by basing our claim on the fundamental
principles of the brotherhood of man and the sovereignty of the masses,
we assumed the championship of the oppressed against their oppressors,
wherever found.
It was thus, by sinking our particular quarrel with George of England
in the universal quarrel of humanity with injustice, that we emerged a
distinct nation, with a unique mission in the world. And we revealed
ourselves to the world in the Declaration of Independence, even as
the Israelites revealed themselves in the Law of Moses. From the
Declaration flows our race consciousness, our sense of what is and
what is not American. Our laws, our policies, the successive steps of
our progress,--all must conform to the spirit of the Declaration of
Independence, the source of our national being.
The American confession of faith, therefore, is a recital of the
doctrines of liberty and equality. A faithful American is one who
understands these doctrines and applies them in his life.
ABRAHAM MITRIE RIHBANY
An intense seriousness is one of the prominent characteristics of the
writings of the immigrant; for immigration is a serious and often
a hazardous undertaking, as the immigrant best knows. But that he
has not failed to appreciate the amusing side of the readjustment
period is evidenced by the many touches of humor in his accounts
of his relation to his new environment. One of the most pleasing
and inspiriting of these accounts is “A Far Journey,” by Abraham M.
Rihbany, who was born in Syria in the year 1869, and who came to the
United States with little money, but with much native intelligence
and an open and receptive mind and soul, eager for the very best that
America has to give.
The bad effects of the gregariousness of the foreigner in America
have frequently been pointed out and deplored; most writers on
immigration have failed to see or mention any of its benefits. It
is interesting to know the opinion on this vexing question of one
who has himself passed safely through a critical transition period.
Speaking of his own experience he says that the Syrian colony in New
York “was a habitat so much like the one I had left behind me in
Syria that its home atmosphere enabled me to maintain a firm hold
on life in the face of the many difficulties which confronted me in
those days, and just different enough to awaken my curiosity to know
more about the surrounding American influences.” Impelled by the
question, “Where is America?” and longing for “something more in the
life of America than the mere loaves and fishes,” he determined to
leave New York and “seek the smaller centers of population, where men
came in friendly touch with one another, daily.”
AMERICA OFFERS SOMETHING BETTER THAN MONEY
I was told while in Syria that in America money could be picked
up everywhere. That was not true. But I found that infinitely
better things than money--knowledge, freedom, self-reliance, order,
cleanliness, sovereign human rights, self-government, and all that
these great accomplishments imply--can be picked up everywhere in
America by whosoever earnestly seeks them. And those among Americans
who are exerting the largest influence toward the solution of the
“immigration problem” are, in my opinion, not those who are writing
books on “good citizenship,” but those who stand before the foreigner
as the embodiment of these great ideals.
The occasions on which I was made to feel that I was a foreigner--an
alien--were so rare that they are not worth mentioning. My purpose
in life, and the large, warm heart of America which opens to every
person who aspires to be a good and useful citizen, made me forget that
there was an “immigration problem” within the borders of this great
Commonwealth. When I think of the thousand noble impulses which were
poured into my soul in my early years in this country by good men and
women in all walks of life; when I think of the many homes in which I
was received with my uncomely appearance and with my crude manners,
where women who were visions of elegance served me as an honored guest,
of the many counsels of men of affairs which fed my strength and taught
me the lasting value of personal achievements, and that America is the
land of not only great privileges, but great responsibilities, I feel
like saying (and I do say whenever I have the opportunity) to every
foreigner, “When you really know what America is, when you are willing
to share in its sorrows, as well as its joys, then you will cease to be
a whining malcontent, will take your harp down from the willows, and
will not call such a country ‘a strange land.’”
Of all the means of improvement other than personal associations with
good men and women, the churches and the public schools gripped most
strongly at the strings of my heart. Upon coming into town, the sight
of the church spires rising above the houses and the trees as witnesses
to man’s desire for God, always gave me inward delight. True, religion
in America lacks to a certain extent the depth of Oriental mysticism;
yet it is much more closely related than in the Orient to the vital
issues of “the life which now is.” Often would I go and stand on the
opposite side of the street from a public-school building at the hour
of dismissal (and this passion still remains with me) just for the
purpose of feasting my eyes on seeing the pupils pour out in squads, so
clean and so orderly, and seemingly animated by all that is noblest in
the life of this great nation. My soul would revel in the thought that
no distinctions were made in those temples of learning between Jew and
Gentile, Protestant and Catholic, the churched and the unchurched; all
enjoyed the equality of privileges, shared equally in the intellectual
and moral feast, and drank freely the spirit of the noblest patriotism.
AN IMMIGRANT TELLS HIS STRUGGLES WITH THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
My struggles with the English language (which have not yet ceased)
were at times very hard. It is not at all difficult for me to realize
the agonizing inward struggles of a person who has lost the power of
speech. When I was first compelled to set aside my mother-tongue and
use English exclusively as my medium of expression, the sphere of my
life seemed to shrink to a very small disk. My pretentious purpose of
suddenly becoming a lecturer on Oriental customs, in a language in
which practically I had never conversed, might have seemed to any one
who knew me like an act of faith in the miraculous gift of tongues.
My youthful desire was not only to inform but to _move_ my hearers.
Consequently, my groping before an audience for suitable diction within
the narrow limits of my uncertain vocabulary was often pitiable.
The exceptions in English grammar seemed to be more than the rules.
The difference between the conventional and the actual sounds of
such words as “victuals” and “colonel” seemed to me to be perfectly
scandalous. The letter _c_ is certainly a superfluity in the English
language; it is never anything else but either _k_ or _s_. In my native
language, the Arabic, the accent is always put as near the end of the
word as possible; in the English, as near the beginning as possible.
Therefore, in using my adopted tongue, I was tossed between the two
extremes and very often “split the difference” by taking a middle
course. The sounds of the letters, _v_, _p_, and the hard _g_, are not
represented in the Arabic. They are symbolized in transliteration by
the equivalents of _f_, _b_, and _k_. On numerous occasions, therefore,
and especially when I waxed eloquent, my tongue would mix these sounds
hopelessly, to the amused surprise of my hearers. I would say “coal”
when I meant “goal,” “pig man” for “big man,” “buy” for “pie,” “ferry”
for “very,” and _vice versa_. For some time I had, of course, to think
in Arabic and try to translate my thoughts _literally_ into English,
which practice caused me many troubles, especially in the use of the
connectives. On one occasion, when an American gentleman told me that
he was a Presbyterian, and I, rejoicing to claim fellowship with him,
sought to say what should have been, “We are brethren in Christ,” I
said, “We are brothers, by Jesus.” My Presbyterian friend put his
finger on his lip in pious fashion, and, with elevated brows and a most
sympathetic smile, said, “That is swearing!”
But in my early struggles with English, I derived much negative
consolation from the mistakes Americans made in pronouncing my
name. None of them could pronounce it correctly--Rih-bá-ny--without
my assistance. I have been called Rib-beny, Richbany, Ribary,
Laborny, Rabonie, and many other names. An enterprising Sunday
School superintendent in the Presbyterian Church at Mansfield, Ohio,
introduced me to his school by saying, “Now we have the pleasure of
listening to Mr. Rehoboam!” The prefixing of “Mr.” to the name of the
scion of King Solomon seemed to me to annihilate time and space, and
showed me plainly how the past might be brought forward and made to
serve the present.
EDWARD ALFRED STEINER
None of our immigrant authors has written with more earnestness of
America and things American than Edward A. Steiner, who was born
in Vienna, Austria, in 1866. Unlike the average immigrant, before
coming to the United States he had received considerable education in
the public schools of his native city, in the gymnasium at Pilsen,
Bohemia, and at the University of Heidelberg. After passing through
most of the hardships incident to the life of an alien, he was
graduated from the Oberlin Theological Seminary and was ordained a
minister of the Congregational Church. Several years were then spent
in pastoral work, and in 1903 he was elected to the Chair of Applied
Christianity at Grinnell College, Iowa. He is widely known both as a
lecturer and an author, and among his numerous books may be mentioned
“On the Trail of the Immigrant,” 1906; “Against the Current,” 1910;
“From Alien to Citizen,” 1914; “Introducing the American Spirit,”
1915; “Nationalizing America,” 1916; “Confession of a Hyphenated
American,” 1916. This last voices the sensitiveness so commonly felt
by Americans of foreign and particularly German birth in the face
of much unreasonable suspicion and prejudice prior to and at the
entrance of the United States into the European War. “Nationalizing
America” is perhaps his most searching book; for in this almost every
American institution is scrutinized, the State, the Church, the
school, and the industrial life being examined in their relation to
the immigrant.
Selections from two chapters of this book (“The Stomach Line” and
“History and the Nation”) have been combined under one title,
“Industrialism and the Immigrant.” “The Criminal Immigrant” is taken
from chapter fourteen of the autobiographical volume, “From Alien to
Citizen.”[7]
THE CRIMINAL IMMIGRANT
To recall prison experiences is not pleasant, and would not be
profitable, if this were merely a narration of what happened to one
individual, a quarter of a century ago. Conditions are not sufficiently
changed, either in judicial procedure or in methods of punishment, to
make this account of _historic_ importance. Its value lies only in
the fact that _no changes_ have occurred, and that my experience then
is still the common fate of multitudes of immigrants, who swell the
criminal records of their race or group, and are therefore looked upon
with dislike and apprehension.
The jail in which I found myself was an unredeemed, vermin-infested
building, crowded by a motley multitude of strikers and strike
breakers,--bitter enemies all, their animosity begotten in the
elemental struggle for bread, and hating one another with an
unmodified, primitive passion.[8]
The strikers had the advantage over us, for they were more numerous and
were acquainted with the ways of American officials. This gave them
the opportunity (which they improved) to make it unpleasant for the
“Hunkies.”
The straw mattress upon which I slept the first night was missing the
second; salt more completely spoiled the mixture called by courtesy
coffee, and the only thing which saved me from bodily hurt was the fact
that there was no spot on me which was not already suffering.
I mention without malice and merely as a fact in race psychology, that
the Irish were the most cruel to us, with the Germans a close second,
while the Welsh were not only inoffensive, but sometimes kind.
One of them, David Hill--smaller than the ordinary Welshman, but
with the courage of his Biblical namesake--stood between me and a
burly Irish Goliath who wanted to thrash this particular “furriner,
who came over here to take away the bread from the lips of _dacent,
law-abiding_ Americans.”
The jailer maintained no discipline and heeded no complaints. His task
was to keep us locked up; the bars were strong and the key invariably
turned.
The strikers gradually drifted from the jail, being bailed out or
released, and I was not sorry to see them go.
Poor food, vermin of many varieties and the various small tortures
endured, were all as nothing to me compared with the fact that for more
than six weeks I was permitted to be in that jail without a hearing;
without even the slightest knowledge on my part as to why I had
forfeited my liberty.
From the barred jail window I could see the workmen going unhindered
to their tasks; on Sunday pastor and people passed, as they went to
worship their Lord who, too, was once a prisoner. None, seemingly, gave
us a thought or even responded by a smile to the hunger for sympathy
which I know my face must have expressed.
My letters to the Austro-Hungarian Consul remained unanswered, and the
jailer gave my repeated questionings only oaths for reply.
The day of my hearing finally came, and I was dragged before the
judge. The proceedings were shockingly disorderly, irreverent and
unjust. I was charged with shooting to kill. The weapon which had
been found in my pocket was the revolver bequeathed me by the dying
man in the Pittsburgh boarding house. As all its six cartridges were
safely embedded in rust, the charge was changed to “carrying concealed
weapons.” I think my readers will agree with me that the sentence of
one hundred dollars fine and three months in the county jail was out of
all proportion to the offence.
The court wasted exactly ten minutes on my case, and then I was
returned to my quarters in the jail, an accredited prisoner. Let me
here record the fact that I carried back to my cell a fierce sense of
injustice and a contempt for the laws of this land and its officials,
feelings that later ripened into active sympathy with anarchy, which at
that time occupied the attention of the American people. My knowledge
of that subject came to me through old newspapers which drifted as
waste around the jail.
In all those months, more than six, for my fine had to be worked out,
or rather idled out, no one came to me to comfort or explain. For more
than six months I was with thugs, tramps, thieves and vermin. I was a
criminal immigrant, a component element of the new immigration problem.
I recall all this now in no spirit of vengeance; as far as my memory is
concerned, I have purged it of all hate. I recall my experience because
those same conditions exist to-day in more aggravated form, while
multitudes of ignorant, innocent men suffer and die in our jails and
penitentiaries.
Since then I have visited most of the county jails, prisons and
penitentiaries in which immigrants are likely to be found. Intelligent
and humane wardens, of whom there are a few, have told me that
more than half the alien prisoners are suffering innocently, from
transgressing laws of which they were ignorant, and that their
punishment is too often much more severe than necessary.
The following narration of several incidents which recently came under
my observation will be pardoned, I hope, when their full import is seen.
Not long ago I went to lecture in a Kansas town,--one of those
irreproachable communities in which it is good to bring up children
because of the moral atmosphere. The town has a New England conscience
with a Kansas attachment. It boasts of having been a station in the
underground railway, and it maintains a most uncompromising attitude
toward certain social delinquencies, especially the sale of liquor.
Upon my arrival I was cordially received by a committee, and one of its
members told me that the jail was full of criminal foreigners--Greeks.
What crimes they had committed he did not know.
Recalling my own experience, I made inquiries and found that six Greeks
were in the county jail. They had been arrested in September (it
was now March) charged with the heinous crime of having gone to the
unregenerate State of Nebraska, where they purchased a barrel of beer
which they drank on the Sabbath day in their camp by the railroad.
Possibly these Greeks were just ignorant foreigners and now harbor no
sense of injustice suffered; possibly they still think this country
“the land of the free and the home of the brave.” They may even be
ready to obey its laws and reverence its institutions. I do not know
how they feel, but I do know this: those Greeks were kept in prison for
breaking a law of which they were ignorant, and even if they were aware
of its existence and broke it knowingly, the punishment did not fit the
crime.
They were kept as criminals and regarded as criminals; they were
unvisited and uncomforted; and they were incarcerated at a time when
their country called for her native sons to do battle against the Turk.
Some day the sense of injustice suffered may come to them, and they
will ask themselves whether every man in Kansas who drinks beer is
punished as they were. They will wonder why real criminals go free, or
escape with nominal punishment. I venture to predict that in some great
crisis, when this country needs men who respect her laws and love her
institutions, these men, and multitudes of others who have suffered
such injustices as they have, will fail her.
I pleaded for those imprisoned Greeks that night, and my plea was
effective. The just judge who condemned them pardoned them; but so just
was he that the fine of one hundred dollars each, not yet paid, was
left hanging over them, and to their credit be it said, they remained
in that town and paid every cent of it. This judge no doubt knows
his New Testament; he certainly made the Greeks pay the “uttermost
farthing” before his outraged sense of justice was appeased.
Those Greeks spent, together, over three years in jail, forfeited more
than fifteen hundred dollars in wages, and lost in bodily health and
self-respect beyond calculation.
Another incident occurred last spring as I was passing through a border
on one of those nerve-racking coal roads.
At a small, desolate mining village a group of men entered the car,
unwillingly enough. They were chained to one another and were driven
to their seats with curses and the butt of a gun. They were Italian
miners, part of that human material now scattered all over the United
States, carried by something swifter, though not less insistent than
the glacial movements which graved the beds of the rivers and shifted
so much of earth’s original scenery. There was some danger of violence,
and the accompanying minions of the law held back the angry passengers.
There was scarcely a moment, however, when they themselves did not
apply some vigorous measure to assure themselves that three undersized
Southern Italians, chained to one another, should not escape them.
The car was uncomfortably crowded and grew more so at every station;
for the next day the new governor was to be inaugurated at the capital,
toward which our train was leisurely travelling.
I had some difficulty in ethnologically classifying the man who shared
my seat. He was large, the colonel and major type, although his head
was rounder. The features, too, were of a different cast, his speech
less refined and his manners less gentle.
He wore a broad, new hat, his hair was long, curling slightly, and he
had an air of special importance, the cause of which I discovered later.
“I wonder why they are treating those poor fellows so roughly,” I
audibly soliloquized, turning to him. He was studying a typewritten
document and evidently did not relish the interruption.
“Is that any of your business?” he asked, punctuating the short
sentence with a liberal supply of oaths.
“Yes, I have no other business,” I replied. “I travel about the world
trying to find out why we people treat one another as we do, if we
happen to be of different races.”
“What kind of business is that?” looking up from his manuscript and
regarding me suspiciously.
“Well,” I said, “we call that ‘Social Psychology.’”
“That’s a new graft,” he replied with a laugh. “How much is there in
it?”
“A little money and a great deal of joy,” I said with an answering
smile.
Then he folded his manuscript and made ready to find out more about my
“graft,” which I proceeded to explain.
“You see, from the beginning, when a man saw another who wasn’t just
like him, he said: ‘Will he kill me or shall I kill him?’ Then they
both went about finding out. The man who survived regarded himself as
the greater man, and his descendants belonged to the superior race.
“We haven’t gone much beyond that point,” I continued. “We hide our
primitive hate under what we proudly call race prejudice or patriotism,
but it’s the old, unchanged fear and dislike of the unlike, and we
act very much as the savages did who may have lived here before the
glaciers ploughed up your State and helped to manufacture the coal you
are now digging.
“I don’t know you,” I went on, “but I am pretty sure that you feel
mean toward those poor ‘Dagoes’ just because you want to assert your
superiority.
“I have discovered that a man isn’t quite happy unless he can feel
himself superior to something, and these mountain folk of yours take
those mangy, hungry looking dogs along just so they can have something
to kick. Am I right?”
“Well,” he replied, clearing his throat and straightening himself,
while into his eyes came a steel-like coldness, “you don’t mean to say
that we are not superior to these Dagoes, these Black Hand murderers?”
“No, I am not ready to say that yet; but tell me about them. Whom did
they kill, and how?”