AMERICANISM
What is Americanism?
On the day this was written there appeared in the daily press a
“pledge” now being circulated among young men, especially in our
colleges and universities:
“I being over 18 years of age hereby pledge myself against enlistment
as a volunteer for any military or naval service in international
warfare, _offensive or defensive_, and against giving my approval to
such enlistment on the part of others.”
Compare with this pledge that solemn oath taken many years ago by the
wise elders of a new republic:
“... in support of these truths we mutually pledge to each other our
lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.”
Which strikes the keynote to the future of America?
“We cannot in this country hope for the compelling devotion which has
animated Germany, still less for the supreme moral and intellectual
force which is the staying power of France,” says Miss Repplier in a
recent statement.
What then _can_ we hope for? Granted our geographical difficulties,
granted our youth, our size, and the consequent imperfect control of
our material resources, granted the complexity of our problem caused
by the rapid immigration of the past years, granted that we are still
a body of states--does this mean that we cannot acquire the spirit of
France and the efficiency of Germany?
I believe Miss Repplier’s attitude (a typical native American one)
shows an entirely mistaken conception of the situation. No nation
ever had a more vigorous birth than ours. This country was founded
upon a body of conviction, clarified by a white heat of passion, but
representing the judgment of deliberate men and great statesmen, men
who saw into the future, and built the ship of state by that vision.
I believe the foundation stones of Americanism are exactly what they
were 140 years ago,--liberty, opportunity, and obligation. We have
lost sight of the third. The conception of liberty upon which this
country was founded was a chastened and a disciplined conception. It
was chastened by a menace to rights as dear as life itself. It was
disciplined by the immediate duty of defending these _by life itself_,
if need be. That chastened and disciplined conception of liberty is
Americanism. We have now the sacred tradition. We have now the liberty.
We have now the opportunity. Our task is to restore to it the austerity
and the discipline of obligation.
A combination of rights and duties, of obligations and privileges,
is the determining idea in those first vehicles of Americanism, our
Declaration of Independence and our Constitution. But in interpreting
and reaffirming these in state constitutions, laws, and municipal
ordinances,--in which for very natural reasons sectional and provincial
points of view have often entered,--we have drifted away from the true
balance between these fundamental rights and duties, a balance which
is at once the delicate spring and the solid rock of our existence.
Prosperity, unusual freedom of choice in vocations, varying and broad
opportunities to control the vast material resources of the country,
have made us complacent about accepting the privileges of a democracy.
We have argued among ourselves endlessly as to just what these
privileges are and whether perhaps any of them are being infringed.
But we have rarely investigated whether we ourselves are giving to
the democracy the respect and service that alone can keep it secure.
Americanism has become for the great mass of Americans a point of view
accompanied by a lukewarm sentiment. The rigor of duty and the ardor of
a passionate belief have entered but little.
Through all our defense discussions and legislation, one amazing thing
has stood out very clearly--that the great majority of private citizens
in America recognize no compelling obligation to place themselves,
their time, or their resources at the disposal of the nation. They
regard this as a voluntary matter. They frequently question whether
the point of national service ought to be raised at all with respect
to the law-abiding citizen who earns his living, provides decently for
his family, and treats his neighbor with respect. The time and energy
outside the office or the job and the necessary duty to home belong to
the moving picture or to the pool room, or to any other pleasure to
which the freeman wishes to devote them. We have made a fetish of our
industrial freedom and we have tied our Americanism to it. The everyday
citizen has ceased to balance national opportunities with national
duties.
In all the long years of our progress and prosperity no clearer concept
or statement of Americanism than this has been made:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created
equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable
Rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness, that to secure these Rights, governments are instituted
among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the
governed.”
But to these words, clear and solemn, this pledge was added:
“And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the
protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our
Lives, our Fortunes, and our Sacred Honor.”
Nothing was said about “the claims of business,” or being “willing to
do anything that may be necessary when the need actually arises.” When
the twentieth-century Americans “mutually pledge to each other” these
things, we shall cease talking about “reasonable preparedness.” We
will arm and train _all_ our manhood. We will restore democracy to the
twentieth century. And we will restore Americanism to America!
Restoring our real traditions of liberty is not a vague task. The
general principles of liberty as stated in the Declaration of
Independence are, in part, very practically interpreted in the
Constitution. As there enumerated they include: freedom of religion;
freedom of speech; freedom of the press; the right of petition; the
right to keep and bear arms; the right to protest against unreasonable
searches and seizures; the right of protection for persons and
property; the right of trial by jury; the right to vote without
abridgment of this right because of race, color, or previous conditions
of servitude.
These are only minimum guarantees. There are other rights of
far-reaching importance--as the right to profit by a free system of
education. And there are besides these rights countless privileges and
dignities which no specific enumeration will cover.
At some time and some where this nation began to think of these
privileges and opportunities rather in deed than in spirit, and to set
them aside as prerogatives for “first Americans.” We began to think of
ourselves as better than other men and to create barriers which could
not but result in injustice and intolerance. And just at that point we
laid the corner stone of our shame to-day.
“First Americans” have already pointed out to us that the framers of
the Constitution never foresaw the “Southern European hordes” that
now flock here. Perhaps not. But I question if the vision would have
disturbed them, or whether it could ever have put greater caution and
reserve into the instrument they were drawing up. The magnanimity of
spirit there expressed is based upon something greater than philosophy.
It is based upon a quality that has nothing to do with changes of times
or conditions, a quality of stern fearlessness, a national conviction
that the destiny of this nation was to be above all else the safeguard
and champion of liberty.
The extent to which we have departed from the ideals set forth in the
Declaration of Independence and the Constitution is best measured by
the way we have come to regard and to treat the most helpless and
trusting of our people--the immigrants who come to our shores. Our
early policy at Castle Garden was to meet them, advise them, protect
them by laws, safeguard their journey, and to consider them as a
valuable asset to America and its future development. Compare with
this the route of the immigrant in America to-day, keeping in mind our
forefathers’ conception of American guarantees of life, liberty, and
happiness.
The immigrant arrives at the port of entry. After passing his
examination (during which time not a friendly word of greeting is given
him, or a personal interest taken in him) he is turned loose upon
the city to be met at the gate by cabmen, porters, runners, crooks,
thieves, and every conceivable kind of exploiter interested in getting
his cash money. This is America’s first reception line. He then meets
our second reception line--the employment agent, the private banker,
and “steering agent” who derive profit from his labor before it has
even become productive. When the immigrant actually goes to work, he
has generally lost his money and is in debt. He then meets our third
American reception line, the employer interested only in his labor
output, and he is treated accordingly. He is generally left alone, to
live as best he can, until he begins to save money. This immediately
calls forth our fourth reception line--the private banker who renews
his acquaintance and offers to help him send his money home; the
speculator in land who looks him up; the get-rich-quick concerns that
advertise in the papers he reads, and the medical quack who sells him
so-called “American” medicines. Some one tells him he may be better off
as a citizen, and then appears our fifth American reception line--the
politician willing to buy his vote because he needs it, the notary
public who is ready to settle his affairs at home so that he can “cut
loose,” and the labor leader who thinks now he ought to be organized.
By the time the immigrant has shaken hands along these various
reception lines he feels he knows everybody, and he has a very
definite idea of liberty, justice, freedom, law, order, and measures
of happiness which in no sense accords with our forefathers’ ideal of
America.
I sometimes wonder when I see men in the night schools studying our
Constitution to enable them to pass their citizenship examinations
how they square its teaching with their various experiences under the
peonage system of the South; with the robberies by the company store
in the coal mines; with the sentences they receive for minor offenses
in justice-of-peace courts which have no interpreters; with the
prohibition that they cannot work at certain trades, for example in
Michigan where they cannot be barbers; with restrictions upon personal
liberty, as in Pennsylvania where they cannot keep a dog; with the
repeated private bank failures in which all their savings were lost;
with the double standard of living under which they see their American
neighbors protected and themselves neglected and exploited.
I ask myself if the time will ever come when we shall restore
Americanism as the signers of the Declaration of Independence conceived
it. We cannot do this until we ourselves believe in practical
Americanism. We are coming to realize that the native American
who makes the lives of our foreign born wholly subservient to the
industrial grind and who neither provides for nor permits them to
become American citizens is himself a strong anti-American influence
in this country; that the native American who permits the foreign
born to enter and denies them the opportunities of America and the
right to work, is really anti-American; that the native American
who emphasizes the liberties and opportunities of America without
correspondingly emphasizing the duties of all American residents is
anti-American. We are beginning to see that the native American is
anti-American who perpetuates class consciousness and race hatred; who
favors or perpetuates the immigrant colony or camp or section with
different standards of living, different law enforcement and isolation
from American influences; who establishes his own home and his own
children in a well-policed, sanitary section of the town and leaves his
immigrant neighbor in another section unprotected and living in filth
and disorder. We are coming to regard that man as a selfish patriot who
consistently and complacently in his factory exacts a physical toll
from his workmen without regard to the cost in citizenship to America;
and that woman as anti-American who takes a girl into the kitchen
because of certain racial excellences, but refuses to consider that
these excellences have any social value to America outside the walls of
that kitchen and who therefore uses and monopolizes her labor capacity
but contributes nothing toward making that girl an American citizen
qualified to preside over an American home. We are coming to see that
a political leader is a menace to a united America who uses newly
naturalized immigrants to swing the American vote in this direction or
that, but who does nothing to make the immigrant a good citizen, or
even to see that he understands American political ideals.
It is impossible to have the spirit of Americanism prevail in this
land when at least a quarter of its people do not understand it, or
have been disillusioned in their dream of it, or have been despoiled
in their search for it. I do not minimize the value of hardship of
obstacles to be overcome. They make for the strength of a nation just
as they do for the strength of a human being. But I like to see the
obstacles set up in a fair field with no favor--where a man can see
them and meet them intelligently. This is what Americanism stands for,
but it is not what it means to the average immigrant. We point with
pride to the immigrant who succeeds in spite of it, but I suspect
that often we judge by his clothes and his house and his speech
rather than by his outlook upon life and his inlook upon himself. We
satisfy ourselves by comparing his lot here with what it was in his
home country--often without real knowledge of either. We fail to see
that we have lost the dream of what America may be and with the dream
the ability to achieve it, when we become content that America should
merely be better than Russia or freer than Austria instead of being the
very best of which America is capable.
This country is full of so-called un-American types. Some of them are
native born and some are foreign born. Immigrant men and women in this
rank of life or that, who have been in this country for years, have
found themselves isolated from and ignored by Americans. American
customs and standards have therefore failed to alter them. The result
is the perpetuation of foreign types or the creation of distinct types
which we refuse to accept as ours, but in the making of which we have
certainly had a controlling hand. Take the typical foreign-born
journalist and publicist. There are hundreds of them to-day fighting
the battle of Americanization for their fellow countrymen here
against fearful odds because they are so far from being Americanized
themselves. Many of them are philosophers, students, zealots; many of
them are all-American in aspiration. But they are not themselves in
possession of the very Americanism they seek to interpret. And their
efforts at Americanizing their fellow countrymen fall as far short as
would a piece of philosophy with a man in need of a pick to earn his
living, bread to eat, or a tongue with which to speak.
Medical quacks, shyster lawyers, saloon-politicians, chronically
bankrupt factory owners or lessees of foreign birth are continually
pointed out to us as the types that are being inflicted upon a
long-suffering America. They are in fact the types that a negligent
America is inflicting upon itself.
How can we expect people from all the nations of the earth, from all
kinds of governments and traditions, to understand the principles of
liberty, as they have been handed down to us? The one thing they do
understand is that the surveillance that prevails in the old country
does not prevail here. Take the small business man or small factory
operator of foreign birth in New York, the frequenter of the bankruptcy
court, the owner of flimsy factory lofts which, when they have been
burnt down, show the evasion of the most obvious laws. These men as
youths in new America see that every man is free to try his hand at
anything he wishes. Seeing _only_ this, they get the idea that the
great American game is the strife of one man against the other, that
this island of Manhattan and this country are a land of single combat
on a large scale, of which competition is the real secret, endurance
and cunning and aggression the winning qualities. When they once get
this idea, and they often get it very rapidly, they follow it as
the dominating principle of their practical existence in America. I
say their practical existence, because the methods pursued by many
immigrant traders, business and professional men in this country
do not represent at all _any moral point of view which they have
evolved themselves_. What they do represent is a practical routine, a
thoughtless application of the principles they see Americans practicing
all around them. And unlike the Americans, they have no background of
American tradition which will interpret differences and distinctions to
them and give them a _general_ criterion.
Certain things are essential to elucidating and preserving Americanism.
One of these is a common language. Not until the necessity for national
defense was thrust upon us have we considered seriously requiring that
all American residents learn English. It is true we said in 1906 that
all naturalized citizens must have a knowledge of the English language,
but we neglected to define what we meant, so the knowledge may consist
of as many words as each of several hundred judges may decide is a fair
test. Not until the business man found that a knowledge of English
reduced accidents did he indorse night schools. Only two states require
compulsory attendance of minors under eighteen years of age to learn
the English language.
This lack of a common language has prevented the American born and
foreign born from getting together in a common Americanism. It has been
a closed door to nationalism.
A second is a common citizenship. We have thought of this as the
most sacred of rights and have safeguarded it with every possible
technicality. Again our policy has been negative, discouraging, and
hampering. We have put up the bars with one hand while with the other
we have poked holes through the hedges for the political boss. We make
it impossible for an alien to acquire citizenship within five years,
but permit him to vote--with all that implies--in eight states after
he has been there a few months. What conception can he have of how
we regard this privilege and right and why has he no compunction in
selling it? He leaves his home country to escape military duty and
attends meetings in America where he is told he is not even expected to
defend this country in case of war. Not one public school in a hundred
makes any provisions for teaching him about American conditions, life,
and government. Again he finds a closed door to Americanism, and it is
small wonder when it is opened that he enters, a skeptic of democracy.
Men work for and defend what is dear to them. When a job is the only
stake, it is a rather narrow base for patriotism. The newly arrived
immigrant is not given much of an opportunity to have any sentiment or
inspiring associations about his job. The average employer feels that
when he raises wages he has discharged his full duty to his workman
and to his country. But America is concerned not only with what a man
earns, but with how he spends it. It is interested in his having a home
stake in America, and in his investing in America. Only a prodigal,
short-sighted, hand-to-mouth nation can look with indifference upon
workmen sending $400,000,000 abroad, and following their savings there
each year.
So it is with his living conditions. In the vermin-ridden bunk house
the Italian dreams of Italy. In the bungalow with a flower garden Italy
is far in the background. The “pursuit of happiness” was mentioned with
life and liberty, but as we have forgotten our duties in privileges,
so have we neglected happiness for life in terms of gain.
We need a new social impulse back of our patriotism. We have come to
the point where we even trifle with the idea that nationalism may be
an outworn thing, too parochial a survival to stand the white light of
the twentieth century. We have a great deal of social emotion of one
kind or another in this country. It has put many healthy ideas into
circulation, registered many needed protests. But it has been so remote
from the actual business of life, so far removed from the job and the
polling booth, that it has done little even for those that have served
it best. The prevailing idea of social freedom in this country within
the last few years has developed among the industrial groups of our
large cities especially a kind of intellectual proletariat, whose creed
is active social reform, but whose practice is intellectualism. This
constitutes a curious menace to Americanism. It seeks to substitute
the “brotherhood of man” for all the loyalties and obligations and
relationships of life. I saw a month or two ago in a widely circulated
magazine a symposium to which many writers and publicists contributed,
stating whether or not they “believed in patriotism” and saw any
validity in it. Some did and some did not. It was discussed as if it
were the protective tariff.
The I. W. W.’s urge their followers to ignore national lines and
unite only as “Workers of the World.” And a great many of those
followers, truly united in their passion for industrial freedom,
hoodwink themselves into believing that in this bond all the debts
and privileges of a national citizenship are more than included. They
come to speak slightingly of those that still hold to so practical a
loyalty. The immigrants, wavering between two loyalties and firmly
fixed in neither, and especially the immigrants who come from those
countries where the social sense is strongly developed, are especially
drawn or think they are by the appeal of a loyalty to “no God and no
master”--and respond readily to the flexible and not too confining
_idea_ of brotherhood. The _idea_ moves and sways the throng. But
when they go home to their crowded rooms in tenements, when they go
the next morning to the job, when they deal with property, those men
and women need a government, understanding and equable, to carry and
control the conditions of their lives, to safeguard their rights, to
aid them to right their wrongs. It alone can give them the guarantees
and the tradition of industrial freedom. They need a loyalty.
We must learn to care. Our hearts must be on fire with belief, or we
shall never have Americanism. We need to go back again to the sources
of our liberty and relight our torches there. It is because we have
not Americanism in our hearts and souls, because we have not been
through the process of Americanization, because we have become slaves
to prosperity and faithless to our ideals that we have failed Europe
at a critical time. Americanism has become a phrase, a trademark, a
passport. Unless somehow and somewhere we can restore belief and zeal
and faith in our destiny we face the disunion of this Republic into
races and creeds, into sectionalism and localism, into class warfare
between capital and labor, into selfish individualism rather than
nationalism.