the cloak of superior knowledge, mischievously and noisily, to the
disturbance of quiet and orderly mental processes and sane progress.
There are the sentimental, unseasoned, intolerant and cocksure
“advanced thinkers,” claiming leave to set the world by the ears, and
with their strident and ceaseless voices to drown the views of those
who are too busy to indulge in much talking.
There are the self-seeking demagogues and various related types, and
finally there are the preachers and devotees of liberty run amuck,
who in fanatical obsession would place a visionary and narrow class
interest and a sloppy internationalism above patriotism, and with
whom class hatred and envy have become a ruling passion. They are
perniciously, ceaselessly and vociferously active, though constituting
but a small minority of the people, and though every election and other
test has proved, fortunately, that they are not representative of
labor, either organized or unorganized.
Among these agitators and disturbers who dare clamorously to assail the
majestic and beneficent structure of American traditions, doctrines and
institutions there are some, far too many, indeed--I say it with deep
regret, being myself of foreign birth--who are of foreign parentage
or descent. With many hundreds of thousands they or their parents
came to our free shores from lands of oppression and persecution. The
great republic generously gave them asylum and opened wide to them the
portals of her freedom and her opportunities.
The great bulk of these newcomers have become loyal and enthusiastic
Americans. Most of them have proved themselves useful and valuable
elements in our many-rooted population. Some of them have accomplished
eminent achievements in science, industry and the arts. Certain of the
qualities and talents which they contribute to the common stock are of
great worth and promise.
When the great test of the war came, the overwhelming majority of them
rang wholly and finely true. The casualty lists are eloquent testimony
to the patriotic devotion of “the children of the crucible,” doubly
eloquent because many of them fought against their own kith and kin.
But some there are who have been blinded by the glare of liberty as a
man is blinded who, after long confinement in darkness, comes suddenly
into the strong sunlight. Blinded, they dare to aspire to force their
guidance upon Americans who for generations have walked in the light of
liberty.
They have become drunk with the strong wine of freedom, these men who
until they landed on America’s coasts had tasted little but the bitter
water of tyranny. Drunk, they presume to impose their reeling gait upon
Americans to whom freedom has been a pure and refreshing fountain for
a century and a half.
Brooding in the gloom of age-long oppression, they have evolved a
fantastic and distorted image of free government. In fatuous effrontery
they seek to graft the growth of their stunted vision upon the splendid
and ancient tree of American institutions.
Admitted in generous trust to the hospitality of America, they grossly
violate not only the dictates of common gratitude, but of those
elementary rules of respect and consideration which immemorial custom
imposes upon the newcomer or guest. They seek, indeed, to uproot the
foundations of the very house which gave them shelter.
We will not have it so, we who are Americans by birth or by adoption.
We reject these impudent pretentions. By all means, let us move forward
and upward, but let us proceed by the chart of reason, experience and
tested American principles and doctrines, and let us not entrust our
ship to demagogues, visionaries or shallow sentimentalists who most
assuredly would steer it on the rocks.
When you once leave the level road of Americanism to set foot upon the
incline of Socialism, it is no longer in your power to determine where
you will stop. It is an axiom only too well attested by the experience
of the past, that the principal elements of the established order of
civilization (of which the institution of private property is one)
are closely interrelated. If you tolerate grave infringement upon any
of these elements, all history shows that you will have laid open to
assault the foundations of personal liberty, of orderly processes of
government, of justice and tolerance, as well as the institution of
marriage, the sanctity of the home, and the principles and practices of
religion.
The strident voices of the fomenters of unrest do not cause me any
serious apprehension, but we must not sit silently by, we must not look
on inactively. Where there are grievances to redress, where there are
wrongs existing, we must all aid in trying to right them to the best of
our conscience and ability.
To the extent that social and economic institutions, however deep and
ancient their roots, may be found to stand in the way of the highest
achievable level of social justice and the widest attainable extension
of opportunity, welfare and contentment, they will have to submit to
change. And the less obstructive and stubborn, the more broad-minded,
co-operative, sympathetic and disinterested those who pre-eminently
prospered under the old conditions will prove themselves in meeting the
spirit of the new day and the reforms which it may justly call for, the
better it will be both for them and for the community at large.
But to the false teaching and the various pernicious “isms” with which
un-Americans, fifty per cent. Americans or anti-Americans are flooding
the country, we must give battle through an organized, persistent,
patient, nationwide campaign of education, of information, of sane
and sound doctrine. The masses of the American people want what is
right and fair, but they “want to be shown.” They will not simply take
our word for it that because a thing is so and has always been so,
therefore it should remain so. They do not mean to stand still. They
want progress. They have no use for the standpatter and reactionary.
Even before the war a great stirring and ferment was going on in the
land. The people were groping, seeking for a new and better condition
of things. The war has intensified that movement. It has torn great
fissures in the ancient structure of our civilization. To restore
it will require the co-operation of all patriotic men of sane and
temperate views, whatever may be their occupation or calling or
political affiliations.
It cannot be restored just as it was before. The building must be
rendered more habitable and attractive to those whose claim for
adequate houseroom cannot be left unheeded, either justly or safely.
Some changes, essential changes, must be made. I have no fear of the
outcome and of the readjustment which must come. I have no fear of
the forces of freedom unless they be ignored, repressed or falsely or
selfishly led.
Changes the American people will make as their needs become apparent,
improvements they welcome, the greatest attainable well-being for all
those under our national roof-tree is their aim. They will strive to
realize what formerly were considered unattainable ideals. But they
will do all that in the American way of sane and orderly progress--and
in no other.
Whatever betide in European countries, this nation will not be torn
from its ancient moorings. Against foes within, no less than against
enemies without, the American people will ever know how to preserve
and protect the splendid structure of light and order, which is the
treasured inheritance of all those who rightfully bear the name
Americans, whatever their race and origin.
MARCUS ELI RAVAGE
The story of the Rumanian immigrant, Marcus E. Ravage, was published
in 1917 under the title, “An American in the Making.” The most
significant steps in his transformation from alien to American seem
to have been his experiences as a sweat-shop worker and as a student
at the University of Missouri. It has sometimes been thought that the
immigrant who wishes to find the real America should go West. At any
rate Ravage is not the only one who has felt the stimulus of the free
and democratic spirit among the people of the Great Plains. We have
heard much in times past of an exchange of professors between the
United States and Europe. One wonders whether a more liberal exchange
both of professors and students between our larger and smaller, our
Eastern and Western and Northern and Southern, and our metropolitan
and our rural institutions of higher learning might not be beneficial
to the intellectual life of the colleges and universities and also,
by helping to eradicate provincialism and sectionalism, to greater
and more abiding national unity.
THE NEW IMMIGRATION
Oh, if I could show you America as we of the oppressed peoples see
it! If I could bring home to you even the smallest fraction of this
sacrifice and this upheaval, the dreaming and the strife, the agony
and the heartache, the endless disappointments, the yearning and the
despair,--all of which must be ours before we can make a home for our
battered spirits in this land of yours. Perhaps if we be young we dream
of riches and adventure, and if we be grown men we may merely seek a
haven for our outraged human souls and a safe retreat for our hungry
wives and children. Yet however aggrieved we may feel toward our native
home, we cannot but regard our leaving it as a violent severing of the
ties of our life, and look beyond toward our new home as a sort of
glorified exile. So, whether we be young or old, something of ourselves
we always leave behind in our hapless, cherished birthplaces. And the
heaviest share of our burden inevitably falls on the loved ones that
remain when we are gone. We make no illusions for ourselves. Though
we may expect wealth, we have no thought of returning. It is farewell
forever. We are not setting out on a trip; we are emigrating. Yes, we
are emigrating, and there is our experience, our ordeal, in a nutshell.
It is the one-way passport for us every time. For we have glimpsed a
vision of America, and we start out resolved that, whatever the cost,
we shall make her our own. In our heavy-laden hearts we are already
Americans. In our own dumb way we have grasped her message to us.
Yes, we immigrants have a real claim on America. Every one of us who
did not grow faint-hearted at the start of the battle, and has stuck it
out, has earned a share in America by the ancient right of conquest. We
have had to subdue this new home of ours to make it habitable, and in
conquering it we have conquered ourselves. We are not what we were when
you saw us landing from the Ellis Island ferry. Our own kinsfolk do not
know us when they come over. We sometimes hardly know ourselves.
WHAT COLLEGE LIFE IN THE WEST DID FOR AN IMMIGRANT
ACQUIRING A SENSE OF HUMOR
On the whole, then, it looked as if I might yet work out my salvation
if only those barbarians would leave me to myself. But it was not in
them to do that. They seemed determined on disturbing my peace of
mind. They were devoting, I honestly believe, all their spare thoughts
and all their inventive genius to thinking up ways of making me
uncomfortable. One young gentleman, still reminiscent of my ignorance
of rural things, made up a tale of how I went to get a job on a farm,
and proceeded to relate it at the table. “The farmer gave Max a pail
and a stool and sent him out to milk the cow. About an hour later, when
the old boy failed to show up with the stuff, Reuben went out to see
what was the trouble. He found his new assistant in a fierce pickle.
His clothes were torn and his hands and face were bleeding horribly.
‘What in heck is the matter?’ asked the farmer. ‘Oh, curse the old
cow!’ said Max, ‘I can’t make her sit on that stool.’” A burst of
merriment greeted the climactic ending, although the yarn was a trifle
musty; and the most painful part of it was that I must laugh at the
silly thing myself.
It was not at all true, as one of my numerous room-mates tried to
intimate, that I shunned baths. I was merely conservative in the
matter. One day, however, he had the indelicacy to ask me the somewhat
personal question whether I ever took a bath; and I told him rather
sullenly, that I did once in a while. Some time later I overheard
him repeat the dialogue to the other men in the house and provoking
shouts of laughter. It puzzled me to see where the joke was, until I
learned that these fellows were taking a shower-bath at the gymnasium
every day. It seemed to me that that was running a good thing into
the ground. Again, I noticed that my room-mates were making a great
show of their toothbrushes. They used them after every meal and before
retiring--as the advertisements say--and always with an unnecessary
amount of splash and clatter. At home I had been taught to keep my
mouth and teeth clean without all this fuss. Nevertheless, I thought
that I would get a brush and join in the drill. After that the other
brushes became noticeably quiet.
And then, of course, there was the institution of the practical joke.
On April 1st there was soap in the pie. If you got in late to a meal,
it was wise to brush your chair and “pick your bites,” if any bites
were left. If not, there was no telling what you might swallow or sit
on. More than once I tasted salt in my water and pepper in my biscuits.
I seemed to have been marked from the first as a fit subject for these
pranks.
On Hallowe’en a squad of cadets commanded by a corporal entered my room
and ordered me to get into my uniform, shoulder my gun, and proceed
to the gymnasium, which, according to the order read, the commandant
assigned me to guard against stragglers. I guarded through a whole
uneventful night. Toward morning the captain of the football team,
who had a room in the gymnasium, returned from a party. I ordered him
to halt and give the password. He smiled and tried to enter. I made a
lunge for him, and would have run my bayonet through him if he had not
begun to laugh. “Go on home, you poor boy,” he said. “They pull that
stunt off every year. Poor joke, I think.” The next day my table-mates
tried to jolly me about it. They said I would be court-martialed as
a deserter from duty. I got angry, and that made them all the more
hilarious. Then a great, strapping fellow named Harvey spoke up. “Be
still, you galoots,” he said to them; and then to me, “For gosh sake,
fellow, be human!” I tried a long time to figure out what he meant by
“human,” and for the rest of my college career I strove to follow his
advice. It was the first real hint I had got on what America, through
her representatives in Missouri, was expecting of me. Harvey became my
first American friend.
THE ROMANCE OF READJUSTMENT
So to New York I went, and lived through the last and the bitterest
episode in the romance of readjustment. During that whole strenuous
year, while I was fighting my battle for America, I had never for a
moment stopped to figure the price it was costing me. I had not dreamed
that my mere going to Missouri had opened up a gulf between me and
the world I had come from, and that every step I was taking toward my
ultimate goal was a stride away from everything that had once been
mine, that had once been myself. Now, no sooner had I alighted from the
train than it came upon me with a pang that that one year out there had
loosened ties that I had imagined were eternal.
There was Paul faithfully at the ferry, and as I came off he rushed
up to me and threw his arms around me and kissed me affectionately.
Did I kiss him back? I am afraid not. He took the grip out of my hand
and carried it to the Brooklyn Bridge. Then we boarded a car. I asked
him where we were going, and he said, mysteriously, “To Harry’s.” A
surprise was awaiting me, apparently. As we entered the little alley
of a store in the Italian quarter, I looked about me and saw no one.
But suddenly there was a burst of laughter from a dozen voices, a door
or two opened violently, and my whole family was upon me,--brothers,
a new sister-in-law, cousins of various degrees, some old people, a
few children. They rushed me into the apartment behind the store,
pelting me with endearments and with questions. The table was set as
for a Purim feast. There was an odor of pot-roasted chicken, and my
eye caught a glimpse of chopped eggplant. As the meal progressed, my
heart was touched by their loving thoughtfulness. Nothing had been
omitted,--not even the red wine and the Turkish peas and rice. Harry
and every one else kept on urging me to eat. “It’s a long time since
you have had a real meal,” said my sister-in-law. How true it was! But
I felt constrained, and ate very little. Here were the people and the
things I had so longed to be with; but I caught myself regarding them
with the eyes of a Western American. Suddenly--at one glance, as it
were--I grasped the answer to the problem that had puzzled me so long;
for here in the persons of those dear to me I was seeing myself as
those others had seen me.
I went about revisiting old scenes, and found that everything had
changed in my brief absence. My friends were not the same; the East
Side was not the same. They never would be the same. What had come over
them? My kinsfolk and my old companions looked me over and declared
that it was I who had become transformed. I had become soberer. I
carried myself differently. There was an unfamiliar reserve, something
mingled of coldness and melancholy, in my eye. My very speech had a new
intonation. It was more incisive, but, less fluent, less cordial, they
thought. Perhaps so. At any rate, while my people were still dear to
me, and always would be dear to me, the atmosphere about them repelled
me. If it _was_ I who had changed, then, as I took in the little world
I had emerged from, I could not help telling myself that the change was
a salutary one.
While calling at the old basement bookshop on East Broadway I suddenly
heard a horrible wailing and lamenting on the street. A funeral
procession was hurrying by, followed by several women in an open
carriage. Their hair was flying, their faces were red with weeping,
their bodies were swaying grotesquely to the rhythm of their violent
cries. The oldest in the group continued mechanically to address the
body in the hearse: “Husband dear, upon whom have you left us? Upon
whom, husband dear?” A young girl facing her in the vehicle looked
about in a terrified manner, seized every now and then the hand of her
afflicted mother, and tried to quiet her. The frightful scene, with
its tragic display, its abysmal ludicrousness, its barbarous noise,
revolted me. I had seen the like of it before, but that was in another
life. I had once been part of such a performance myself, and the grief
of it still lingered somewhere in my motley soul. But now I could only
think of the affecting simplicity, the quiet, unobtrusive solemnity of
a burial I had witnessed the previous spring in the West.
The afternoon following my arrival I flew uptown to see Esther. She
waved to me and smiled as I approached--she had been waiting on the
“stoop.” As she shook my hand in her somewhat masculine fashion, she
took me in with a glance, and the first thing she said was: “What a
genteel person you have become! You have changed astonishingly.” “Do
you think so?” I asked her. “I am afraid I haven’t. At least they do
not think so in Missouri.” Then she told me that she had got only ten
points, but that she was expecting three more in the fall. She was
almost resigned to wait another year before entering college. That
would enable her to make her total requirements, save up a little more
money, and get her breath. “A woman is not a man, you know,” she added.
“I am beginning to feel the effects of it all. I am really exhausted.
Geometry has nearly finished me. And mother has added her share. She is
no longer young, and this winter she was ill. I have worried and I have
had to send money. But let us not talk about my troubles. You are full
of things to tell me, I know.”
Yes, I had lots I wanted to say, but I did not know where to begin;
and the one thing that was uppermost in my mind I was afraid to utter
lest she should misunderstand and feel injured and reproach me. I did
not want her to reproach me on first meeting. I wanted to give myself
time as well as her. And so we fell into one of those customary long
silences, and for a while I felt at home again, and reflected that
perhaps I had been hasty in letting the first poignant reactions
mislead me. Toward evening Esther remarked that it was fortunate I
had got to town the day before. If I had no other plans, she would
take me to a meeting at Clinton Hall where Michailoff was to speak on
“The Coming Storm in America.” It would be exciting, she said, and
enlightening. Michailoff had just come out of prison. He was full of
new impressions of America and “the system” generally, and one could
rely on him to tear things open.
Of course we went, and the assemblage was noisy and quarrelsome and
intolerant, and the hall was stuffy and smelly, and the speaker was
honest and fiery and ill-informed. He thundered passionately, and as if
he were detailing a personal grievance against American individualism
and the benighted Americans who allowed a medieval religion and an
oppressive capitalistic system to mulct and exploit them, and referred
to a recent article in the _Zukunft_ where the writer had weakly
admitted the need of being fair even to Christianity, and insisted that
to be fair to an enemy of humanity was to be a traitor to humanity. I
listened to it all with an alien ear. Soon I caught myself defending
the enemy out there. What did these folk know of Americans, anyhow?
Michailoff was, after all, to radicalism what Higgins and Moore were to
Christianity. His idea of being liberal was to tolerate anarchism if
you were a socialist and communism if you were an individualist. And,
as we left the hall, I told Esther what I had hesitated to tell her
earlier in the evening.
“Save yourself, my dear friend. Run as fast as you can. You will find
a bigger and freer world than this. Promise me that you will follow me
to the West this fall. You will thank me for it. Those big, genuine
people out in Missouri are the salt of the earth. Whatever they may
think about the problem of universal brotherhood, they have already
solved it for their next-door neighbors. There is no need of the social
revolution in Missouri; they have a generous slice of the kingdom of
heaven.”
Maybe I was exaggerating, but that was how I felt. From this distance
and from these surroundings Missouri and the new world she meant to me
was enchanting and heroic. The loneliness I had endured, the snubbing,
the ridicule, the inner struggles--all the dreariness and the sadness
of my life in exile--had faded out of the picture, and what remained
was only an idealized vision of the clean manhood, the large human
dignity, the wholesome, bracing atmosphere of it, which contrasted so
strikingly with the things around me.
No, there was no sense in deceiving myself, the East Side had somehow
ceased to be my world. I had thought a few days ago that I was going
home. I had yelled to Harvey from the train, as it was pulling out of
the station at Columbia, “I am going home, old man!” But I had merely
come to another strange land. In the fall I would return to that other
exile. I was, indeed, a man without a country.
During that entire summer, while I opened gates on an Elevated train
in Brooklyn, I tussled with my problem. It was quite apparent to me
from the first what its solution must be. I knew that now there was no
going back for me; that my only hope lay in continuing in the direction
I had taken, however painful it may be to my loved ones and to myself.
But for a long time I could not admit it to myself. A host of voices
and sights and memories had awakened within me that clutched me to my
people and to my past.