"The Population of These States"
In the back of our minds we have an image labeled "the immigrant"; and
it is never like ourselves. The image has changed from generation to
generation, but it has never been accurate, because in each generation
it is a political cartoon, an exaggeration of certain features to
prove a point. We have to tear up the cartoon; then we can get back to
the picture it distorts.
_English-Speaking Aliens_
The immigrant-cartoon since 1910 has been the South-European: Slavic,
Jewish, Italian; usually a woman with a shawl over her head, her
husband standing beside her, with slavic cheekbones or a graying
beard; and eager children around them. This is not a particularly
false picture of several million immigrants; among them some of the
most valuable this country has had. But it erases from our mind the
bare statistical fact that the largest single language group, nearly
_one third of all_ the immigrants to the United States, were
English-speaking. For several decades, the bulk of all immigration was
from Great Britain and Ireland. If one takes the three principal
sources of immigration for every decade between 1820 and 1930, one
finds that Germany and Ireland were among the leaders for sixty years;
Italy for forty; Russia only thirty; the great Scandinavian movement
to the middle west lasted a single decade; but Great Britain was one
of the chief sources of immigration for seventy years, and probably
was the principal source for thirty years more--from 1790 until
1820--during which time no official figures were kept.
Out of thirty-eight million arrivals in this country, about twelve
spoke the dominant tongue, and most of them were aware of the
tradition of Anglo-Saxon self-government; some had suffered from
British domination, more had enjoyed the fruits of liberty; but all
knew what liberty and respect for law meant. Many of these millions
fled from poverty; but most were not refugees from religious or
political persecution. Many millions came to relatives and friends
already established; and began instantly to add to the wealth of the
country; many millions were already educated. The cost of their
upbringing had been borne abroad; they came here grown, trained, and
willing to work. They fell quickly into the American system, without
causing friction; they helped to continue the dominance of the
national groups which had fought the Revolution and created the new
nation.
It is important to remember that they were, none the less, immigrants;
they made themselves into Americans and helped to make America; they
helped to make us what we are by keeping some of their habits, by
abandoning others. For this is essential: the British immigrant, even
when he came to a country predominantly Anglo-Saxon, did not remain
British and did not make the country Anglo-Saxon. The process of
change affected the dominant group as deeply as it affected the
minorities. It was a little easier for a Kentish man to become an
American than it was for a Serbian; but it was just as hard for the
man from Kent to remain a Briton as it was for the Serbian to remain a
Serb. Both became Americans. Neither of them tried to remake America
in the mold of his old country.
_Who Asked Them to Come?_
The next image in our minds is a bad one for us to hold because it
makes us feel smug and benevolent. It is the image of America, the
foster-mother of the world, receiving first the unfortunate and later
the scum of the old world. It is true that the oppressed came to
America, and that in the forty million arrivals there were criminals
as well as saints. The picture is false not only in perspective, but
in basic values. For in many generations, at the beginning, in the
middle, and at the end of the great inrush of Europeans, the United
States actively desired and solicited immigration.
Obviously when people were eager to emigrate, the solicitation fell
off; Irish famine and German reaction sent us floods of immigrants who
had not been individually urged to come. But their fathers and elder
brothers had been invited. The Colonies and the States in their first
years wanted settlers and, as noted, wrote their need for new citizens
into the Declaration; between two eras of hard times we built the
railroads of the country and imported Irish and Chinese to help the
Civil War veterans lay the ties and dig the tunnels; in the gilded age
and again at the turn of the century, we were enormously expanding and
again agents were busy abroad, agents for land companies, agents for
shipping, agents for great industries which required unskilled labor.
Moreover, the Congress of the United States refused to place any
restrictions upon immigration. The vested interest of labor might
demand restrictions; but heavy industry loved the unhappy foreigner
(the nearest thing to coolie labor we would tolerate) and made it a
fixed policy of the United States not to discourage immigration. The
only restriction was a technical one about contract labor. It did not
lower the totals.
_America Was Fulfilment!_
The moment we have corrected the cartoon we can go back to fact
without self-righteousness. The fact is that arrival in America was
the end toward which whole generations of Europeans aspired. It did
not mean instant wealth and high position; but it did mean an end to
the only poverty which is degrading--the poverty which is accepted as
permanent and inevitable. The shock of reality in the strike-ridden
mills around Pittsburgh, on the blizzard-swept plains of the Dakotas,
brought dismay to many after the gaudy promises made by steamship
agents and labor bosses. But in one thing America never failed its
immigrants--the promise and hope of better things for their children.
America was not only promises; America was fulfilment.
No one has measured the exact dollar-and-cents value of believing that
the next generation will have a chance to live better, in greater
comfort and freedom. In America this belief in the future was only a
projection of the parallel belief in the present; it was a reaction
against the European habit of assuming that the children would, with
luck, be able to live where their parents lived, on the same income,
in the same way. The elder son was fairly assured of this; war and
disease and colonies and luck would have to take care of the others.
The less fortunate, the oppressed, could not even hope for this much.
At various times the Jew in Russia, the liberal in Germany, the
Sicilian sulphur-miner, the landless Irish, and families in a dozen
other countries could only expect a worse lot for their children; they
had to uproot themselves and if they themselves did not stand
transplanting, they were sure their children would take root in the
new world.
And this confidence--which was always justified--became as much a part
of the atmosphere of America as our inherited parliamentary system,
our original town-meetings, our casual belief in civil freedom, our
passion for wealth, our habits of movement, and all the other
essential qualities which describe and define us and set us apart from
all other nations.
The immigrant knew his children would be born Americans; for himself
there was a more difficult and in some ways more satisfying fate: he
could _become_ an American. It was not a cant phrase; it had absolute
specific meaning. The immigrant became in essence one of the people of
the country.
As soon as he was admitted, he had the same civil rights as the
native; within a few years he could acquire all the basic political
rights; and neither the habits of the people nor the laws of the
government placed anything in the way of social equality; the
immigrant's life was his own to make.
This did not mean that the immigrant instantly ceased to be a Slav or
Saxon or Latin any more than it meant that he ceased to be freckled or
brunette. The immigrant became a part of American life because the
life of America was prepared to receive him and could not, for six
generations, get along without him.
_America Is Various_
During the years in which big business solicited immigration and
organized labor attacked it, the argument about the immigrant took an
unfortunate shift. The question was whether the melting pot was
"working", whether immigrants could be Americanized. There were people
who worried if an immigrant wore a shawl, when "old Americans" were
wearing capes; (the "old Americans" wore shawls when they arrived,
forty years earlier); it was "unfortunate" if new arrivals spoke with
an "accent" different from the particular American speech developed at
the moment. There were others who worried if an immigrant too quickly
foreswore the costume or customs of his native land. Employers of
unskilled labor liked to prevent superficial Americanization;
sometimes immigrants were kept in company villages, deliberately
isolated from earlier arrivals and native Americans; wages could be
kept low so long as the newcomers remained at their own level of
comfort, not at ours. Others felt the danger (foreseen by Franklin and
Jefferson) of established groups, solidified by common memories,
living outside the circle of common interests. The actual danger to
the American system was that it wouldn't work, that immigrants coming
in vast numbers would form separate bodies, associated not with
America but with their homeland. (This is precisely what happened in
Argentina, by the deliberate action of the German government, and it
is not an invention of Hitler's. Thomas Beer reports that "in 1892 ...
a German imperialist invited the Reichstag to secure the ...
dismemberment of the United States by planting colonies of civilized
Europeans" within our borders, colonies with their own religious
leaders, speaking their own language; German leaders never could
accept the American idea of change; in Hitler's mind a mystic "blood"
difference makes changing of nationality impossible.)
The first World War proved that the "new immigrants", the masses from
South Europe, as well as the Germans, could keep their ancient customs
and be good Americans; then observers saw that their worries over
"assimilation" were beside the point; because the essence of America's
existence was to create a unity in which almost all variety could find
a place--not to create a totality brooking no variation, demanding
uniformity. In the flush of the young century William James, as
typical of America as Edison or Theodore Roosevelt, looking about him,
seeing an America made up of many combining into one, made our variety
the base of his religious outlook. He had studied "the varieties of
religious experience", and he began, experimentally, to think of a
universe not necessarily totalitarian. He saw us building a country
out of diverse elements and found approval in philosophy. He saw
infinite change; "it would have depressed him," said a cynical and
admiring friend, "if he had had to confess that any important action
was finally settled"; just as it would have depressed America to admit
that the important action of creating America had come to an end.
James "felt the call of the future"; he believed that the future
"could be far better, totally other than the past". He was living in
an atmosphere of transformation, seeing men and women becoming "far
better, totally other" than they had been. He looked to a better
world; he helped by assuring us that we need never have one King, one
ruler, one fixed and unalterable fate. He said that there was no proof
of the one single Truth. He threw out all the old totalitarians, and
cast his vote for a pluralistic universe. We were building it
politically every day; without knowing it, James helped to fortify us
against the totalitarians who were yet to come.
This was, to be sure, not Americanization. It was the far more
practical thing: becoming American. Americanization was something
celebrated on "days"; it implied something to be done _to_ the
foreigners. The truth was that the immigrant needed only one thing, to
be allowed to experience America; then slowly, partially, but
consistently, he became an American. The immigrant of 1880 did not
become an American of the type of 1845; he became an American as
Americans were in his time; in every generation the mutual experience
of the immigrant, naturalized citizens and native born, created the
America of the next generation. And in every generation, the native
born and the older immigrants wept because _their_ America and their
way of becoming American had been outmoded. The process passed them
by; America had to be reborn.
So long as the immigrant thought of "taking out citizen papers" and
the native born was annoyed by accents, odd customs, beards and
prolific parenthood, the process of becoming American was not
observed, and the process of Americanization seemed obvious and
relatively unimportant.
The tremendous revolution in human affairs was hidden under social
discords and economic pressures. People began to think it was time to
slacken the flow of immigrants until we had absorbed what we had. Good
land was scarce; foreigners in factions began to join unions;
second-generation children grew up to be great tennis players and took
scholarships; the pure costless joy of having immigrants do the dirty
work was gone. The practical people believed something had to be done.
But the practical people forgot the great practical side--which is
also the mystical side--of our immigration. For the first time since
the bright days of primitive Christianity, a great thing was made
possible to all men: they could become what they wished to become. As
Peter said to the Romans, and Paul to the Athenians, that through
faith and desire and grace they could become Christians, equal, in the
eyes of God, to all other Christians, so the apostles of Freedom
spoke to the second son of an English Lord, to the ten sons of a
Russian serf, to old and young, ignorant and wise, befriended or
alone, and said that their will, their ambition, their work, and their
faith could make of them true Americans.
The instant practical consequences of this new element in human
history are incalculable. They are like the practical consequences of
early Christianity, which can be measured in terms of Empires and
explorations and Crusades. The transformation of millions of Europeans
into Americans was like the conversion of millions of pagans to
Christianity; it was accompanied by an outburst of confidence and
energy. The same phenomena occurred in the Renaissance and
Reformation, a period of conversion accompanied by a great surge of
trade, invention, exploration, wealth, and vast human satisfaction.
This idea of becoming American, as personal as religion, as mystical
as conversion, as practical as a contract, was in fact a foundation
stone of the growth and prosperity of the United States. It was a
practical result of the exact kind of equality which the Declaration
invoked; it allowed men to regain their birthright of equality,
snatched from them by tyrants. It persuaded them that they could enjoy
life--and allowed them to produce and to consume. In that way it was
as favorable to prosperity as our land and our climate. And it had
other consequences. For, as it stemmed from equality, it went deep
under the roots of the European system--and loosened them so that a
tremor could shake the system entirely.
_Change and Status_
For the European system stood against _becoming_; its objective was to
remain, to be still, to stand. Its ancient greatness and the tone of
time which made it lovely, both came from this faith in the steady
long-abiding changelessness of human institutions. All that it
possessed was built to endure for ever; its cathedrals, its prisons,
its symbols, its systems--including the symbols and the systems by
which it denied freedom to its people. Each national-racial-religious
complex of Europe was a triple anchor against change; it prevented men
from drifting as the great winds of revolution and reform swept over
Europe. Nor were men permitted to change, as they pleased. Nations
waged war and won land, but neither the Czars nor the German Emperors
thought of the Poles as their own people; the Poles were irrevocably
Poles, excluded from the nobler society of Russians, Austrians and
Germans. Religious societies made converts, but looked with fear or
hatred or suspicion against the very people from whom the converts
came--the Jew was irretrievably a Jew, the Catholic a Catholic. In
each country one religion was uppermost, the rest tolerated. In each
country one folk-group was dominant, the rest tolerated or persecuted.
And in each country one class--the same class--ruled, and all other
classes served.
By ones or twos, men and women might be accepted into the established
church, marry into the dominant race, rise to the governing class; but
the exceptions proved nothing. The European believed in his _station_
in life, his civil _status_, the _standing_ of his family in the
financial or social world. The Englishman settling in Timbuctoo
remained an Englishman because the Englishman at home remained a
middle-class bank clerk or "not a gentleman" or a marquess; and while
an alien could become a subject of the King, he never for a moment
imagined that he could become an Englishman--any more than a Scot. The
English knew that names change; men do not.
_Only when they came to America, they did._
They did because the basic American system, the dynamics of becoming
American, rejected the racialism of Europe; it rejected aggressive
nationalism by building a new nation; it rejected an established
religion; and almost in passing it destroyed the class-system.
To the familiar European systems of damnation--by original sin, by economic
determinism, by pre-natal influence--has been added a new one--damnation by
racial inferiority; the Chamberlain-Wagner-Nietzsche-Rosenberg-Hitler myth
of the superior race-nation means in practise that whoever is not born
German is damned to serve Germany; there is no escape because the
inferiority is inherent. This is the European class-system carried to
its loftiest point.
We say that this system is inhuman, unscientific, probably suicidal.
The poverty-system on which Europe "prospered" for generations and
into which we almost fell, was also inhuman, unscientific and probably
suicidal; there is no logic in the British aristocratic system coupled
with a financial-industrial overlordship and universal suffrage; there
is little logic even in our own setup of vast organizations of labor,
huge combinations of money, unplumbed technical skill hampered by both
capital and labor, and some forty million underfed and half sick human
beings in the most productive land in the world. It is not logic we
look for in the framework of human society; we look for operations.
What does it do? For all its failures, our system works toward human
liberty; for all its success, the Nazi system works against human
liberty. We tend to give more and more people an opportunity to change
and improve; their system is based on the impossibility of change. Our
system is a nation built out of many races; theirs is a nation
excluding all but one race. Our system has lapses, we do not grant
citizenship to certain Orientals nor social equality to Negroes; but
we do not write racial inferiority into our laws, we do not teach it
in _our_ schools (it may be taught in sectional schools we tolerate,
but do not support); and this is important. So long as we accept the
ideal of political equality, hope lives for every man. The moment we
abandon it, we nazify ourselves--and destroy the foundation of the
Republic.
_Americans All_
Turning from the brutal leveling and uniformity of the Nazis, good
Americans have begun to wish that more of the folk qualities of our
settlers had been preserved. At every point America is the enemy of
fasci-feudalism, and this is no exception. Our music, our dancing, the
language we speak, the foods we eat, all incorporate elements brought
from Europe; but we have not deliberately encouraged the second
generation to preserve clothes and cooking any more than we have
encouraged the preservation of political habits. There has been a loss
in variety and color; and now, while there is still time, efforts are
being made to create a general American interest in the separate
cultures combined here. It has to be carefully done, so that we do not
lose sight of the total American civilization in our enthusiasm for
the contributing parts. There is always the chance that descendants of
Norwegians, proud and desperate as they consider the plight of their
country, will become nationalistic here; and that they will not be
interested in the music or the art of Ukrainians in America; and that
Americans of Italian descent may be the only ones concerned in adding
to the Italian contribution to American life. This is the constant
danger of all work concerned with immigrant groups; and the
supersensitiveness of all these groups, in a period of intense
100%-ism, tends to defeat the purpose of assaying what each has done
to help all the others.
Yet some success is possible. In 1938 I worked with the Office of
Education on a series of broadcasts which drew its title from the
President's remark to the Daughters of the American Revolution, that
we are all the descendants of immigrants. (The President also added
"and revolutionaries", but this was not essential in our broadcasts.)
Everything I now feel about the focal position of the immigrant in
American life is developed from the work done on the Immigrants All
series and, especially, from the difficulties encountered, as well as
from one special element of success.
I set down some basic principles: that the programs would not
_glorify_ one national group after another; that the interrelation of
each arriving group to the ones already here would be noted; the vast
obligation of every immigrant to those who had prepared the way would
be stressed; cooperation between groups would be dramatically rendered
if possible; the immigrants' contribution to America would be
paralleled by America's contribution to the immigrant; and the making
of America, by its natives and its immigrants, would overshadow the
special contribution of any single group.
These were principles. In practise, some disappeared, but none was
knowingly violated. From time to time, enthusiasts for a given group
would complain that another had been more warmly treated; more serious
was the indifference of many leaders of national and folk groups to
the general problem of the immigrant, to any group outside their own.
We were, by that time, in a period of sharpened national
sensibilities; but this did not entirely account for an apparently
ingrained habit of considering immigrant problems as problems of one's
own group, only. Suspicion of other groups went with this neglect of
the problem as a whole; the natives born with longer American
backgrounds were the ones who showed a clearer grasp of the whole
problem; they were not bothered by jealousies and they were interested
in America.
On the other side, the series had an almost spectacular success. More
than half of the letters after each weekly broadcast came from men and
women who were _not_ descendants of the national group presented that
week. After the program on the Irish, some 48% of the letters were
from Irish immigrants or native-born descendants of the Irish; the
other 52% came from children of Serbs and FFV's and Jews and
Portuguese, from Sicilians and Germans and Scots, Scandinavians and
Englishmen and Greeks. It was so for all of the programs; the defects
of the scripts were forgotten, because the people who heard them were
so much better Americans than anyone had dared predict. Of a hundred
thousand letters, almost all were American, not sectarian in spirit;
the bitterness of the cheap fascist movements had not affected even a
fringe of the listeners. All in all, we were encouraged; it seemed to
us that the immigrant was accepted as the co-maker of America.
Much of our future depends on the exact place we give to the
immigrant. It has been taken for granted that immigration is over and
that the proportions of racial strains in America today are fixed for
ever. It is not likely that vast immigration will head for the United
States in the next decade; but the principle of "becoming American"
will operate for the quotas and the refugees; and it is now of greater
significance than ever because the great fascist countries have laid
down the principle of unchangeable nationality. The Nazi government
has pretended a right to call German-born American citizens to the
colors; and a regular practise of that government is to plant
"colonies" as spies.
If we do not re-assert the principle of change of nationality (the
legal counterpart to the process of becoming American) we will be lost
in the aggressive nationalism of the Nazis, and we will no longer be
safe from racialism. Preposterous as it will seem to scholars,
degrading as it will be to men of sense, racialism can establish
itself in America by the re-assertion of Anglo-Saxonism (with
variations).
_Are We Anglo-Saxon?_
At this point the direct political implications of "becoming American"
become evident. Toward the end of this book there are some questions
about union with Britain; the point to note here is that so far as
Union-now (or any variant thereof) is based emotionally on the
Anglo-Saxonism of the United States of America, it is based on a myth
and is politically an impossible combination; if we plan union with
Britain, let it be based on the actuality of the American status, not
on a snobbish desire. We cannot falsify our history, not even in favor
of those who did most for our history.
There is a way, however, of imputing Anglo-Saxonism to America, which
is by starting with the great truth: the English and the Scots--and the
Scots-Irish--founded the first colonies (some time after the Spaniards
to be sure, but that is "a detail"); they established here certain
basic forms of law and cultivated the appetite for freedom; they were
good law-abiding citizens, and accustomed to self-discipline; they were
great pioneers in the wilderness; they suffered for religious liberty
and more than any other national or racial group, they fought the War
of Independence.
Can we say these men created the true, the original America; and
everything since then has been a corruption of its 100% goodness and
purity? This would allow us to rejoice in Andrew Carnegie, but not in
George W. Goethals; in Hearst but not in Pulitzer; in Cyrus McCormick
but not in Eleuthere Dupont; in the Wright Brothers, but not in Boeing
and Bellanca; in Edison (partly as he was not all Scot) but not in his
associate Berliner; in Bell who invented the telephone but not in
Pupin who created long distance. We should have to denounce as
un-American the civil service work of Carl Schurz and Bela Schick's
test for diphtheria and Goldberger's work on pellagra (which was
destroying the pure descendants of the good Americans); we would have
to say that America would be better off without Audubon and Agassiz
and Thoreau; or Boas and Luther Burbank; or John Philip Sousa and Paul
Robeson and Jonas Lie.
When we have denied all these their place in America, we can begin to
belittle the contribution of still others to our national life. For
the later immigrants had less to give to transportation and basic
manufactures and to building the nation. These things were done by the
earlier immigrants. The later ones gave their sweat and blood, and
presently they and their children were troubling about education, or
civil service, or conservation of forests, or the right of free
association, or art or music or philanthropy. If our own special
fascists lay their hands on our traditions, the burning of books will
be only a trifle; for they will tear down the museums and the
settlement houses, the kindergartens and the labor temples--and when
they are done they will say, with some truth, that they have purged
America of its foreign influence. All reform, all culture will be
destroyed by the New Klansmen, and they will re-write history to make
us believe that wave after wave of corruption came from Europe
(especially from Catholic and Greek Orthodox and Jewish Europe) to
destroy the simple purity of Anglo-Saxon America.
That is why, now, when we can still assess the truth, when we need the
help of every American, we must declare the truth, that there never
was a purely Anglo-Saxon United States. Frenchmen and Swedes and
Spaniards and Negroes and Walloons and Hollanders and Portuguese and
Finns and Germans and German Swiss were here before 1700; Quakers,
Catholics, Freethinkers and Jews fought side by side with Huguenots,
Episcopalians, Calvinists and Lutherans in the wars with the Indians.
In the colony of Georgia, in the year Washington was born, men of six
nations had settled: German Lutherans, Italian Protestants, Scots,
Swiss, Portuguese, Jews and English. In 1750 four times as many
Germans arrived in Pennsylvania as English and Irish together.
_The Creative Anglo-Saxon_
The greatness of the Anglo-Saxon contribution to America--the gift
greater than all their other great gifts--was the conception of a
state making over the people who came here, and made over by them. By
the end of the Revolution, power and prestige were in the hands of the
Anglo-Saxon majority; and in three successive instruments they
destroyed the idea of Anglo-Saxon superiority: the Declaration of
Independence, the Ordnance of 1787, the Constitution. "Becoming" was
not an ideal and it was not the base of Anglo-Saxon society in
England; the concept of change and "becoming" was based on actuality;
on what was happening all over the colonial dominion. People were
becoming American, even before a new nation was born.
All that followed--the vast complexity of creating America, would have
been impossible without that first supreme act of creative
self-sacrifice. When the statesmen of our Revolutionary period
established the principles of statehood and naturalization and
citizenship in terms of absolute equality, they knew the risk they
ran. In Pennsylvania the official minutes were printed in both English
and German; in Maryland the Catholics were dominant; there were still
some influential Dutch along the upper Hudson who might secede from
New York. On the western boundary, unsettled, uneasy, lay the
Spaniards and the French. There was danger of division, everywhere;
but the great descendants of the English immigrants did not withdraw.
Their principle was equality; since men were born free, they could
_become_ equal if artificial barriers were removed. The statesmen of
that day declared for America; they knew that men did not, in this
country, remain Dutch or Portuguese; but grew into something else.
With their own eyes they had seen it happen. They pledged their lives
and sacred honor that it would happen again.
So, if ever we re-write history to prove that all the other nations
contributed nothing and failed to become Americans, we will also have
to write it down that the Anglo-Saxons failed more miserably than the
others. For the great idea, the practical dynamics of equality, was
theirs; they set it in motion, guarded it, and saw it triumph.
In the next ten years it will be impossible to extemporize an
immigration policy for the United States. The world economy will
change all around us; the dreadful alternations of plenty and
starvation may be adjusted and controlled; we may enter a world order
in which we will be responsible for a given number of souls, and some
of these may be admitted to our country. By that time we will have
learned that nationalist fascism and international communism are
powerless here; and no one but professional haters of America will be
left to bait the foreigners and persecute the alien.
But above all, by that time we will have had time to reassert the
great practical idea behind immigration and naturalization--the idea
of men making themselves over--as for a century and a half they have
made themselves into Americans.
_An Experiment in Evolution_
NOTE: I have used the phrase "becoming American" and defined it as it
defined itself; legally, in the customs of the country, it seems to
mean becoming a citizen; experimentally "becoming" has happened to us,
we have seen it happen, it means that we recognize an essential
affinity between an immigrant and Americans, living or dead.
Yet to many people the words may be vague; to others they may seem a
particularly dangerous lie. Those who are interested in certain
foreign groups, less promptly "Americanized", will protest that for
all this "becoming", some are not accepted as American; those who are
basically haters of all foreigners will say that the _law_ accepts
citizens, but no power on earth can make them Americans.
It is my experience that the phrases created by poets, politicians and
people are often the truest words about America; and one of the
profound satisfactions of life is to see the wild imagery of the poet
or the lush oratory of the politician come true, literally and exactly
true, scientifically demonstrated and proved.
In this particular case, absolute proof is still lacking, because we
are dealing with human beings, we cannot make controlled experiments.
We can observe and compare. Under the inspiration of the eminent
anthropologist Dr. Franz Boas, the research has been made; so far as
it goes it proves that the children of foreigners do become Americans.
Specifically, their gestures, the way they stand and the way they
walk, their metabolism and their susceptibility to disease, all tend
to become American. In all of these aspects, there is an American norm
or standard; and the children of immigrants forsaking the norm or
standard of the fatherland, grow to that of America.
The most entertaining of these researches was in the field of gesture.
The observers took candid movie shots of groups of Italians and of
Jews; they differ from one another and both differ from the American
mode (which is a composite, with probably an Anglo-Saxon dominant).
The observers found that the extreme gesture of the foreign-born Jew
is one in which a speaker gesticulates with one hand while with the
other he holds his opponent's arm, to prevent a rival movement; and
one case was noted in which the speaker actually gesticulated with the
other man's arm. To the American of native stock this is "foreign";
and research proves that the American is right; such gestures are
foreign even to the American-born children of the foreigner himself.
The typical foreign gesture disappears and the typical American
gesture takes its place.
And this is not merely imitation; it is not an "accent" disappearing
in a new land. Because metabolism and susceptibility to disease are as
certainly altered as gait and posture. The vital physical nature
changes in the atmosphere of liberty--as the mind and the spirit
change.
The frightened lie of racial doom which has fascinated the German mind
(under its meaner guise of racial superiority) was never needed in
America. Seeing men become Americans, the fathers of our freedom
declared that nothing should prevent them; they were not afraid of any
race because they knew that the men of all races would become
Americans. Their faith of 1776 begins to be scientifically proved
today; a hundred and sixty-six years of creative America proved it in
action.
It is on the basis of what Europeans became in America, that we now
have to consider our relations with the Europeans who remained in
Europe.