State official now going to be sworn in. There was a coal miners’
strike--rather a chronic disease in that somewhat lawless State--and
the militia was called out. Violence begat violence, and one of the
militiamen, standing guard at night, was killed by a bullet, fired from
a Winchester rifle at an approximately certain distance.
The Italians were found at that place the next day, were arrested, and
were now on their way to the county seat to be tried.
My companion evidently had found my “graft” interesting, for he
permitted me to interview the Italians.
None of them knew definitely of what crime they were accused, and all,
of course, protested their innocence.
None of them had served as soldiers and all said they were unacquainted
with the use of firearms.
When we reached the end of the road where we were all admonished to
change cars and not forget our parcels, the officer graciously allowed
me to make an experiment. The men were freed from their shackles, and
I told them that a high and mighty official was watching them and that
the best marksman of the group would find favor in his sight. They
were then in turn given the Winchester rifle, which they handled as if
it were a pickaxe. They did not know how to load it, and after it was
loaded for them and I asked them to fire, they fell upon their knees
and begged to be permitted to show their prowess with a stiletto, the
use of which they understood. Within twenty-four hours additional
testimony was furnished, which proved beyond doubt that the Italians
were not implicated in the crime with which they were charged.
I felt deeply grateful to the man who permitted me to intervene in
their behalf; but what would have happened if by chance, or the power
we call Providence, I had not been thrown into the sphere of their
suffering? Undoubtedly they would have been convicted of murder and
paid the penalty for a crime which they never committed.
Not only is ignorance of our laws and language a fruitful cause of
the delinquency of immigrants and their children, but the venality of
police officials, the condition of our courts and prisons, not only
fail to inspire respect, but contribute much to the development of
those criminal tendencies with which nature has, to a degree, endowed
all men....
Fortunately, I left the county jail with no thirst for blood; but with
a fiercer passion to right the wrongs under which men suffer, and that,
I think, was my one purpose in life when the prison door closed behind
me.
INDUSTRIALISM AND THE IMMIGRANT
We talk much about the American home, which is even yet the basis of
national well-being, although many of its functions are abrogated. The
home still determines the good or ill of the child, and through him the
good or ill of the nation. Yet we permit millions of people to work,
with no chance to make a real home.
Children there will be, Nature sees to that; but what kind of children
can be begotten in our slums?
The slums in America are as much a national disgrace as they are a
national menace. The gunmen of New York were bred in hovels which even
the home-making genius of the Jewish people could not turn into homes,
or make fit for the training of children to decent living.
You who go slumming to see the sights, and turn up your sensitive noses
at the bad smells, and your eyes to heaven, thanking God that you
“are not as other men,” must not forget that the vast majority of our
foreign-born workers are compelled to live as they do by economic and
social forces, which they cannot control.
You remain ignorant of the brave struggles for the home, and the heroic
stand for virtue behind those sooty walls. You know nothing of the fear
of God, the desire to obey His law, and the love of their country,
which filters in to those receptive souls.
The growth and power of the I. W. W., a revolutionary organization of
the most radical type, anti-national, anti-religious, repudiating God
and State with horrifying blasphemy, were made possible by the fact
that our industrial leaders, our so-called “hard-headed business men,”
have the hard spot in their hearts and a very soft spot in their heads.
Of all the blind men I have met, the blindest are those farsighted ones
who see wealth in everything, and every common bush aflame with gold,
and see nothing else. Blind they are to their own larger good, blind to
the nation’s needs, blind to the signs of the times. The social weal
of our country is in the hands of the most unsocial....
As I analyze my own relation to the nation of which I am as much a part
as if I had been born under its flag, I find that it rests itself upon
the feeling of gratitude. Not for the bread I eat, for I had bread
enough in my native country; not for the comfort of home, for I had
fair comforts before I came; not even for liberty and democracy as
abstractions, or even as embodied in the State; for I have found that
freedom is within, and democracy a matter of attitude towards one’s
fellows.
I am grateful for the chance I have had here to develop unhampered
my own self, for a certain largeness of vision which I think I would
not have developed anywhere else; for the richness which a broad,
unhindered contact with all sorts and conditions of men has brought
into my life.
There is something more than gratitude in my heart now. There
is a larger sense of the values I received which I have not yet
appropriated. There is in my heart a sublime passion for America. Would
it have grown into the burning flame it is, if I had always worked in
New York’s sweat-shops?
If I had been beaten by New York’s police? If I had reared my family in
a tenement, and had to send my children to work when they should have
played and studied?
If I had known America only through her yellow journalism, and sensed
her spirit only in ward elections? I do not know.
What has kept me from becoming an Anarchist, from being jailed or
hanged for leading mobs against their despoilers, God alone knows. His
guidance is as unquestioned as it is mysterious. There were disclosed
to me, early in my career, in some strange way, the spiritual values
latent here. In spite of the gross, granite-like materialism at the
top, I discovered the richness of the heritage left by the fathers of
this Republic; in spite of the poverty and hardship in which I had
to share, I saw here the fine quality of its vision; in spite of the
crudeness of its blundering ways, all the love a man may have for a
country grew in my heart, and changed only in growing stronger. Yet I
am not in the mood to call to account those toilers whose patriotism is
less fervent than mine and whose ideals are still held in check by the
“stomach line.”
Editors and preachers, teachers and capitalists, with all the loud if
not mighty host of us who are yammering about the want of patriotism
among the masses, and the weakness of our national spirit; we are the
first who must move a notch higher in our love of country and above the
“stomach line.” We must make real the spiritual ideals for which this
country stands, or at least try to realize them, before we can teach
the alien and his children, or even our own, the meaning of liberty and
democracy. Before we can ask them to die for our country we shall have
to learn to live for it, and the definite task we have before us is not
the mere idolatry of our flag, or the making of shard and shell.
To provide an adequate wage for our men, to so arrange our industrial
order that there shall not be feverish activity to-day, and idleness,
poverty, bread lines and soup kitchens to-morrow. To make working
conditions tolerable, to provide against accidents and sickness,
unemployment and old age, and to be true to the life about us.
These are national factors, essential to the making of an effective
national state in our industrial age. Capital, in common with labor,
must learn how to lend itself to the national purpose; for we have come
upon a time, or the time has come upon us, when we must learn how to
melt all classes, all sections and all races into a final unit. This
is the time to touch the hearts and gain the confidence of all the
people by a high regard for all, so that together we may turn our faces
towards our ultimate goal....
The Commonwealth Steel Company of Granite City, Illinois, one of those
remarkable corporations with a soul, whose business is rooted in the
ideal of service, found its foreign laborers quartered in what was
called “Hungry Hollow.” This company so exemplified the American spirit
of fair play that, when the foreign employees were aroused to proper
civic pride, they rebaptized “Hungry Hollow” into “Lincoln Place,”
because Lincoln’s spirit was manifested towards them.
The Lincoln Progressive Club, as they named their organization,
has as its immediate aim the study of the English language, and
Americanization.
I wish there might be erected in every industrial center a statue of
Abraham Lincoln for masters and men to see and reverence, thus being
reminded of their duty towards each other and towards their common
country.
What a people we could become if the immortal words he spoke were
graven upon the pedestal of such a statue, “With malice towards
none, with charity towards all,” ... to greet our eyes daily, and to
challenge our conduct.
The history of the United States since the Civil War has not yet been
written, for it is the story of an epoch just closing. It marks the
sudden leaping of a people into wealth, if not into power; the fabulous
growth of cities, the end of the pioneer stage, the beginning of an
industrial period, and the pressure of economic and social problems
towards their solution.
At least twenty millions of people have come full grown into our
national life from the steerage, the womb out of which so many of us
were born into this newer life. Most of us came to build and not to
destroy; we came as helpers and not exploiters; we brought virtues and
vices, much good and ill, and that, not because we belonged to this or
the other national or racial group, but because we were human.
It is as easy to prove that our coming meant the ill of the nation as
that it meant its well-being. To appraise this fully is much too early;
it is a task which must be left to our children’s children, who will be
as far removed from to-day’s scant sympathies as from its overwhelming
prejudices.
The great war has swung us into the current of world events, and it
ought to bring us a larger vision of the forces and processes which
shape the nations and make their peoples. As yet we are thinking
hysterically rather than historically, and the indications are that we
may not learn anything, nor yet unlearn, of which we have perhaps the
greater need.
Thus far we have become narrower rather than broader, for the feeling
towards our alien population is growing daily less generous, and our
treatment of it less wise.
Nor am I sure in what wisdom consists; the situation is complex; for
we are the Balkan with its national, racial and religious contentions.
We are Russia with its Ghetto, its Polish and Finnish problem. We are
Austria and Hungary with their linguistic and dynastic difficulties.
We are Africa and Asia; we are Jew and Gentile; we are Protestant and
Greek, and Roman Catholic. We are everything out of which to shape the
one thing, the one nation, the one people.
Yet I am sure that we cannot teach these strangers the history of their
adopted country, and make it their own, unless we teach them that our
history is theirs as well as ours, and that their traditions are ours,
at least as far as they touch humanity generally, and convey to all
men the blessings which come from the struggle against oppression and
superstition.
In their inherited, national prejudices, in their racial hates, in
their tribal quarrels, we wish to have no share, except as we hope to
help them forget the old world hates in the new world’s love.
None of us who have caught a vision of what America may mean to the
world wish to perpetuate here any one phase of Europe’s civilization or
any one national ideal.
Although our institutions are rooted in English history, though we
speak England’s language and share her rich heritage of spiritual and
cultural wealth, we do not desire to be again a part of England, or
nourish here her ideals of an aristocratic society.
In spite of the fact that for nearly three hundred years a large part
of our population has been German, and that our richest cultural
values have come from Germany, in spite of her marvellous resources in
science, commerce and government, we do not care to become German, and
I am sure that Americans of German blood or birth would be the first to
repudiate it, should Germany’s civilization threaten to fasten itself
upon us.
We do not wish to be Russian, in spite of certain values inherent in
the Slavic character, nor do we desire to be French.
We do crave to be an American people--and develop here an American
civilization; but if we are true to the manifold genius of our varied
peoples, we may develop here a civilization, richer and freer than any
of these, based upon all of them, truly international and therefore
American.
Historians tell us that the history of the United States illumines and
illustrates the historic processes of all ages and all people.
To this they add the disconcerting prophecy that we are drifting
towards the common goal, and that our doleful future can be readily
foretold. We have had our hopeful morning, our swift and brilliant
noon, and now the dark and gruesome end threatens us.
I will not believe this till I must.
I will not, dare not lose the hope that we can make this country to
endure firmly, to weather the storm, or at least put off the senility
of old age to the last inevitable moment.
When, however, the end comes, as perhaps it must, I pray that we may
project our hopes and ideals upon the last page of our history, so that
it may read thus: This was a state, the first to grow by the conquest
of nature, and not of nations. Here was developed a commerce based upon
service, and not upon selfishness; a religion centering in humanity and
not in a church.
Here was maintained sovereignty without a sovereign, and here the
people of all nations grew into one nation, held together by mutual
regard, not by the force of law.
Here the State was maintained by the justice, confidence and loyalty of
its people, and not by battleships and armaments. When it perished, it
was because the people had lost faith in God and in each other.
FOOTNOTES:
[7] Copyright, by Fleming H. Revell Co. Reprinted by permission of the
publishers.
[8] The author was working as a miner at Connellsville, Pennsylvania,
when the strike and general riot occurred, during which he was beaten
into unconsciousness and hustled off to jail.
GEORGE A. GORDON
The Old South Church, Boston, has had a prominent and patriotic part
in American history since early days. It was a Puritan immigrant
and layman of this church, Samuel Sewall, who was one of the first
to speak out against human slavery in his tract, “The Selling of
Joseph”; and it was in this church that the five patriotic addresses,
published in 1917 under the title, “The Appeal of the Nation,” were
delivered by George Angier Gordon, pastor of the church since 1884.
The Rev. Dr. Gordon, who was born in Scotland in 1853 and received
his common school education there, came to the United States in
1871. In 1881 he obtained the degree A.B. from Harvard. He has since
served his Alma Mater frequently in the capacity of University
preacher, and many Harvard men will recall his inspiring talks in the
college chapel. In the following selection he manifests the poignant
homesickness, the sterling loyalty, and the noble aspiration so
common in the writings of the immigrant.
THE FOREIGN-BORN AMERICAN CITIZEN: COST, PRIVILEGE AND DUTIES OF HIS
CITIZENSHIP
The Republic of the United States is in fact a nation of immigrants,
a nation of aliens. All have made the great migration, all have come
hither from other parts of the earth. The only difference among
Americans is that some came earlier while others came much later,
indeed as it were yesterday, to these shores. The only aboriginal
American is the Indian. This historic fact should be forever borne in
mind. We came hither first or last, across the ocean, and from the ends
of the earth.
There is however a ground of distinction among Americans; they are
rightly divided into native citizens and citizens foreign-born. The
native citizen has grown into the being of the society that his alien
ancestors helped to form. He has in his blood an American inheritance;
his instincts have been fed with native food; he is alive to nothing
else as he is to the American Republic. We foreign-born Americans
acknowledge his distinction, we rejoice in his happiness, we count
ourselves fortunate to stand with him in the great communion of
free citizens. We ask him, in his turn, to read in the story of our
migration the struggle of his ancestors; we remind him of what we
left behind, what we brought with us, and at what cost we gained our
American citizenship.
In the words that I have chosen as my text[9] we have a foreign-born
Roman citizen. Exactly where he was born we do not know; we do know
that he was born outside Roman citizenship. He was, therefore, an
adopted citizen of the Roman Empire, and to this he refers in the words
that I have quoted, “With a great sum obtained I this citizenship.”
There are three implications in these words: the cost of citizenship
to this man; the privilege of citizenship to him; his duty as a Roman
citizen. These three points will be a convenient guide to us in our
discussion of the subject of the morning--“The Foreign-born American
Citizen.”
1. First of all, then, there is the cost to this man of citizenship in
the Roman Empire. He obtained it with a great sum; to get it made him
poor.
There are few among native-born American citizens who understand
the sacrifice made by the foreign-born citizens of the heritage of
childhood and boyhood in the wonder world of early life. There is the
bereavement of the early mystic, unfathomable touch of nature that
comes to one only through one’s native land. Never again to see the sun
rise and set over the dear old hills, with the hero’s mantle like the
bloom of the heather resting upon them, and the shadow of an immemorial
race, is truly a great bereavement. Never again to see the green
pastures, with the flocks quietly feeding in them, under the shade of
the plot of trees here and there mercifully provided by the humanity of
previous generations, nor to hear the music of the river that has sung
into being and out of being forty generations of human lives; never
again to see the fields covered with corn, nor to hear the reaper’s
song among the yellow corn; never again to see the light that welcomed
you when you were born, that smiled on you when you were baptized, that
went with you to school, that watched your play, that constituted the
beautiful, the glorious environment of your early days; never again
to hear the song of the native birds, the skylark in the morning, the
mavis at nightfall, and the wild whistle of the blackbird under the
heat of noon from his thorny den,--all this is simply inexpressible
bereavement. Nature is inwoven with the soul in its earliest years;
its beauty, its wildness, its soul becomes part of the soul of every
deep-hearted human being, and never again can nature be seen as she was
seen through the wonder of life’s morning.
It is this spell of nature over the young soul that gives its exquisite
pathos to Hood’s world-familiar melody:
“I remember, I remember,
The house where I was born,
The little window where the sun
Came peeping in at morn;
He never came a wink too soon.
Nor brought too long a day,
But now I often wish the night
Had borne my breath away!
...
“I remember, I remember,
The fir trees dark and high;
I used to think their slender tops
Were close against the sky:
It was a childish ignorance,
But now ’tis little joy
To know I’m farther off from heav’n
Than when I was a boy.”
There it is, the mystic, divine influence of nature through the
atmosphere of the country of one’s birth; every immigrant to this
country makes that great surrender.
There is, too, the early humanity. You go down town, you who are
native-born American citizens, and every day you meet those whom you
have known from birth, your earliest playmates and schoolmates, and
those who went to college with you, who entered business with you, who
fought side by side with you through the Great War, who loved what you
loved in early life, revered what you revered, laughed at what you
laughed at and felt as you felt over the glory and the tenderness of
existence. You do not know what they have left behind them who never
see a face that they knew in childhood, who will never meet again, till
time is no more, a schoolmate or an early companion, who will never
gather again in the old home with father and mother and brothers and
sisters; only the most favored have had a fugitive glance, like looking
at a telegraph pole from an express train, of those dear, early faces.
There is a whole world of bereavement of early, tender, beautiful
humanity on the part of all who come here. And this again you hear in
those two verses in “Auld Lang Syne”:--
“We twa hae run about the braes,
And pu’d the gowans fine,
But we’ve wander’d monie a weary foot
Sin’ auld lang syne.
“We twa hae paidl’d in the burn
From morning sun till dine,
But seas between us braid hae roar’d
Sin’ auld lang syne.”
There is due other surrender: there is the suffering of adjustment in
a new country. The first year I spent in Boston, from July, 1871, to
considerably more than July, 1872, I conceived my condition to be as
near that of the spirits in hell as anything I could well imagine! To
be in a city where nobody knew you, where you knew nobody, where so
many wanted to take advantage of the “greenhorn,” to laugh at him if
he ever grew for a moment a bit sentimental, was not exactly heaven.
Many and many a time I went down to the wharf to see the ships with
their white sails, written all over with invisible tidings from the
far, sunny islands left behind, and if I had not been restrained by
shame and pride I should have gone home. That is the experience of
Scandinavian, English, Scotch, Irish, Teuton, Slav, Armenian, Syrian,
and Latin; the great bereavement of nature and of early humanity is
deepened by the sorrow of readjustment in a foreign land. “With a great
sum obtained we this citizenship”; few understand it, few indeed.
Foreign-born American citizenship is preceded by a vast sacrifice, and
you never can understand that sort of citizenship till you take account
of this really profound experience.
2. The next thing in the experience of the chief captain was his
privilege as a Roman citizen. His station and bearing and power told of
that privilege. He was a military tribune in the legion stationed in
Jerusalem; he had risen to important command and power impossible for
him, inaccessible to him if he had not obtained citizenship.
America has been called the land of opportunity. Look at this fact
in three directions only, since time will not allow more. The common
workman may become, by intelligence, by diligence and by fidelity,
the master workman. Cast your eyes over the land to-day and assemble
the master workmen, and you will find that the vast majority of them
have risen from the position of ordinary workmen to the chief places
in their trade and calling. Such a chance for ascension in a broad way
for all competent men, in the Old World, is a simple impossibility. The
chance does not exist there. Men rise there by talent and by luck, by
talent and by favoritism. But here in a broad and magnificent manner
they rise by talent and industry, fidelity and force; here as nowhere
else, they have a chance to work out what is in them.