THE NATIVE AMERICAN
I find the future of America a far more hopeful and beautiful thing
to contemplate from the trenches of a new subway than from a Fifth
Avenue bus. Perhaps it is because in one is seen the raw material of
hopes, ideals, and ambitions in the making,--a people eagerly looking
forward; while in the other these ideals are already fashioned, perhaps
discarded,--a people looking backward. I am not more afraid of the
ignorant vote than of the absent vote; of the discontented alien than
of the satisfied American; of the hungry laborer than of the surfeited
idler; of the casual laborer than of the overworked industrial captain;
of the patient, plodding hand toiler than of the dreamer of the
get-rich-quick concerns; of the alien with the family back home than of
the American with no family at all. They all go to make up one America.
When we think of a united America, our minds naturally turn to
Americanizing the immigrant. Big as that task is, I do not believe that
our greatest difficulty lies with him. Rather I fear that we shall have
to Americanize our native Americans first--in increased respect for the
flag, in conscious renewed allegiance to America, in the patriotic use
of the nation’s holidays, in measures of national service. We have, I
think, to return to the civilian training camp and universal service
as a melting pot for natives before we can make America a successful
melting pot for aliens.
The average native American is local, provincial, self-interested,
constitutionally opposed to any change that may threaten his particular
established local order. The average native employer looks askance
at anything that may upset his labor supply, be that a shop census
or workmen’s compensation. The average native employee does not take
to such new-fangled ideas as health insurance and promotion based
on record. It is the native-born American woman who crosses to the
American side of the street and who still meets and discusses the
immigrant as a problem. I suspect it was a native American who dubbed
the Italians “dagoes,” the Hungarians, “hunkies,” the Lithuanians
“round heads,” and so on. There is no better invention for prolonging
personal conflict than derisive nicknames, and America seems to have
done its share in this direction.
It is natural that those who carry responsibilities should be
conservative, but the native American seems to me to carry this
responsibility to the verge of reaction and antagonism. I am reminded
of a time when I had occasion to summon an employer and employee before
me for a hearing upon a wage dispute and was reminded that it was
presumption to set the employee opposite the employer to discuss such
a trivial matter on equal terms. I am constantly asked to entertain
women’s clubs who find immigration “interesting,” but whose members
shrink from the neighborly services which they might render in their
own communities.
There are always many exceptions to any general statement. But this
does not alter the fact that the native American has a point of view, a
state of mind, a prejudiced observance, a sense of superiority--which
makes him greatly in need of Americanization. This is acquired by the
native boy and girl early in life. What opportunity has the average
native-born boy and girl to learn about American citizenship and its
duties and rights? The public and parochial schools give little more
than history and an indifferent kind of civil government, which seems
to us as we learn it to have little to do with us or our future. Our
patriotic days are largely holidays from school, filled with fun and
pranks, but rarely with any sense of their real significance. They seem
to have nothing to do with the very freedom we enjoy on those days.
The boy becomes a voter by the mere act of registering his name. The
average girl is unconscious that she ever _becomes_ a citizen unless
she is interested in suffrage or anti-suffrage, or unless practical
property questions arise. We can hardly expect under these conditions
much realization of what nationalism means, or that a call to national
service will meet with much response. The surprising thing is that in
spite of our official neglect and indifference, youths are filled with
patriotism and desire to serve, if it can be utilized before the shop
and home absorb all their energies.
I believe that a really careful, impartial analysis of our situation
to-day would reveal two things: that there are two main systems of
thought and lines of activity upon which the hope and future of America
depend--one is government and the other is business. They alone have a
nation-wide organization, whose units reach every American community
and every American resident. To the government we look for law, order,
education, justice, and the essentials of community life; to the
industry for the job or the market which gives life to the community.
_Go where you will, in the last analysis a native American controls the
situation._ The man higher up, if you go high enough, is invariably a
native-born American. It is said that there are more native-born sons
of Connecticut in Oregon than in Connecticut, but the great industries
of Connecticut that set the pace for the state are in the hands of
native Americans. So it is with government. Minor offices, sometimes
even important offices, are in the hands of naturalized citizens, but
usually with the consent or approval of some native American--sometimes
far removed from the scene of action.
The radius of this native American influence bears no relation to
numbers. It encompasses the school, the home, the neighborhood, the
personal life of the resident. We fill our night schools by adjusting
them to the industrial organization and securing its coöperation.
We fill our civilian training camps by the coöperation of employers
in granting absences and paying wages. We obtain a common standard
of living by enforcement of laws that set the standard. Civic and
philanthropic agencies may be the pioneers, the educators, the balance
restorers; they can care for the waste and discover causes. But America
has too long regarded them as the unifiers of its many peoples, as the
makers of citizens. We now know that this task comes squarely back to
the political and industrial leader and to no other; to the native
born and to no other.
America is the proud possessor of some significant and far-reaching
illusions which make a poor foundation for the structures it is seeking
to build. Chief among these is the assertion that the immigrant lowers
the American standard of living. In the final analysis it is America
that lowers the immigrant’s own standard of living. A double standard
of living is imposed upon the immigrant by the responsible native
American.
Of the many hundreds of immigrant communities which I have studied, I
recall none in which American ideals were being aggressively menaced
by immigrants who were determined to have none of them. Isolation,
betrayal of our own minimum social and civic standards, these I have
seen over and over again. But always the immigrant population has been
the weaker force in any given community. There are in the country
to-day hundreds of towns, say of 1500 population, in which the foreign
born number one half. But in civic strength, social influence, and
political power, the immigrant 50 per cent measures less than 10
per cent. In the census they appear as towns of 1500. In reality the
native-born residents of these towns consider them as towns of about
500--with an unfortunate though necessarily large annex of immigrant
workmen and their families who live “on the other side of the railroad”
or in some other segregated spot--to which fire and water systems,
garbage collections and calling do not penetrate. Now there can be no
doubt that that large “annex” is a menace to the future of America.
But it is a menace produced by American neglect, not by immigrant
aggression and malevolence.
We shall never solve the immigration problem so long as we begin with
the immigrant’s shortcomings, nor shall we attain Americanism so long
as we define it as nativism. We need not fear that we are not as
much in control as we ever were. We set the standards. The question
is whether we have cause to be satisfied with the way in which we do
it. The ideals and standards of America are set by the American born
to-day just as they were in our early history. In all communities
which I have studied the American-born residents or employers are the
determining factors. The citizen may send you through many devious
channels, to see this boss and that boss, to win friends for your cause
from this foreign-born leader or that immigrant saloon-keeper, but
eventually you deal with a native American, not with an alien.
Mr. Ross, in the “Old World in the New,” points to a typical Western
town of 26,000 inhabitants, 10,000 of them immigrants, and gives a
picture of the vice, intemperance, bad housing, and wretched standards
of living resulting in this town from the immigrant population. We
in America believe in majority rule. There was a safe margin of 6000
Americans in that town, free to establish and insist upon any standard
they chose. Why were the Americans beaten in the struggle? Because here
as in many places they ignored or definitely isolated the immigrants,
permitting them to work all day with Americans at the mills or
factories where they were needed, and then encouraging or compelling
them to spend all the rest of their time in their own corner of the
town, and to encroach no more than necessary upon the respectable
streets and schools and churches and recreations of the American
section.
Persecuted America! Miss Repplier, lamenting the immigrant invasion
of Philadelphia, in the _Atlantic Monthly_ not long ago, presents
a truly colonial point of view concerning the suffering wrought by
the twentieth-century world of America in this colonial stronghold.
In the mind of Miss Repplier and many thousands of Americans the
long-suffering American, heir of all the ages, legatee of all the best
traditions of liberty and opportunity sealed in 1776, is now driven
like sheep before the advancing immigrant hordes:
“Dirt is a valuable asset in the immigrant’s hands. With its help he
drives away decent neighbors, and brings property down to his level
and his purse. The ill-fated Philadelphian is literally pushed out
of his home--the only place, sighs Mrs. Pennell, where he wants to
live--by conditions that he is unable to avert, and unwilling, as well
as unfitted, to endure.”
Old Philadelphians that would never have run from an Indian, that
would have conquered the forests and spanned the rivers, run from the
Italian and the Pole. Alas! We too have deteriorated. We see nothing
dramatic, we feel no challenge, in the fight to raise the standards of
our less fortunate neighborhoods. We cannot find any inspiration in
that ideal of justice which insists on law enforcement equally among
all residents of a neighborhood. Is there nothing to be said on behalf
of the neighborly, friendly visiting which would soon make dirt as
unfashionable in the immigrant’s as in the Philadelphian’s home? The
reason that the tenement fire escapes are cluttered in Rivington Street
and free on Fifth Avenue is not, as we fondly suppose, that immigrants
prefer fire escapes draped with bedding and pillows and children.
The answer is that they move to Fifth Avenue as soon as their income
permits and as fast as they learn how well it is possible to live in
America.
Let us take a town in the making and see if the standards do not come
back to some native American. Take, for instance, the towns that
have grown up during the war-order prosperity, which is typical of
our town building in the past in America. American capital, directed
by native-American enterprise and brains, selects a site and builds a
model factory, secures the necessary transportation facilities and puts
in its power and machines. Anything else? Yes, the skilled labor market
is scarce of men, so a few good houses are put up for skilled workmen,
upon whom the operation of the plant depends.
As for the mass of foreign-born unskilled workmen, relying upon a
well-stocked market, no provision is made for housing, sanitation, or
other care of them. This is left to the individual workman and to the
speculator. When a cluster of huts, tents, or bunk houses spring up, is
it because the immigrant prefers the huts or tents, or is it because
the only power to create standards--the native-American power--has
ignored its obligation?
It is the same with contract work. The contractor, in figuring the cost
of road building, includes not only materials, grades, etc., but the
cost of decent housing for his American workmen. The immigrant workman
he leaves to the padrone. The padrone is one of the most anti-American
forces in this country, and he exists only by the grace of the
native-born American employer. No immigrant body can impose him upon an
employer who does not find him useful.
I am invariably met with the fact that native Americans refuse to
rent to immigrants because of their alleged defacement of property.
The one remedy seems to be eviction and refusal to rent. I have not
yet found that a limitation on boarders in the rental clause has been
tried or that any effort has been made to teach these tenants the
meaning and methods of an American standard of living. I have not found
that such conveniences as an adequate and accessible water supply,
garbage collection, prompt repairs, and interest in the well-being of
the tenants bear in the mind of the landlord much relation to care of
person and property. The native American thinks of the immigrant tenant
as an inferior human being, used to something quite different, and
almost unconsciously brings the American standard down to his own idea
of the immigrant’s capacities.
There are, of course, many people--not confined to immigrants--who are
indifferent to or incapable of maintaining an American standard of
living. Eliminating these, I believe that the native American can and
must set the standard, pay decent enough wages to make it possible, and
then admit no excuses whatever for non-performance. In my judgment it
is a fallacy to suppose that increased wages and shorter hours alone
will Americanize America, unless there goes with these things some
education as to their use.
Paternalism? I have in mind a steel mill where the employer has
increased wages 50 per cent, and established eight-hour shifts; where
the most perfect conditions prevail in his plant, where his first-aid
and safety-first work are excellent. He believes that to build company
houses would be paternalism. Almost every one in the town works in
his mill. He has added 5000 workmen to the village within a year. No
private capital will take the risk of building houses for his war
industry. His men sleep 5 to 15 in a room, often on the floor and in
their clothing; they have no care and eat badly prepared food. They
crowd family houses, destroying privacy and morality. That plant
employed last year 34,000 men to keep an average of 15,000. This
registers the immigrant’s protest,--the only one possible,--moving on.
Yet one native-born American controls the health, decency, morality,
and efficiency of some 8000 immigrant workmen whose only protest is to
move on, and whose only future is high enough wages to return to his
home country.
And the worst of it is that men get used to these conditions,
believing them to be American, and with this belief go the dreams,
the visions, and ambitions which are the essence of good citizenship.
The prospective good citizen is sacrificed to the demand for cheap
labor which is a native-American demand. For the few hundreds of men
that are indifferent to or incapable of appreciating an American
standard of living thousands are sacrificed daily at the hearth of the
indifferent, complacent native American who thinks of them only as cogs
in his machine and rarely as future citizens of America.
There is no more representative class of native Americans in the
popular mind than those bearing old family names. The youth of America
read and store up all the available information about them and aim to
duplicate their achievements in dress, manner, entertainments, and
work. And yet I can take you to any one of the great estates that
they occupy, and if they employ immigrant labor, you will find it
housed in miserable shacks, lacking the decencies and comforts of an
American standard of living. You will find that the native Americans
had these shacks put up and receive rent for them. You will find also
that the immigrant has but one choice, to leave his job if he wants
something better. Ask yourself, as an American with a family dependent
upon you, whether you would have the courage to make this choice. I
have in mind as I write a most exclusive club which is the wonder of
the Hudson Valley for sheer beauty and order; and I see below the
railroad track its thousand employees who toil all day to produce that
beauty, housed in wretched frame buildings in bad repair and crowded
with boarders because there are not enough houses. I find there the
future citizens of America being brought up without regard to decency
and morality, living 5 to 10 in a room, while the little native-born
boy or girl in the clubhouses has a room and a bath to himself. Now
this difference is not alone the difference of wealth. It goes deeper
than that. The club owns the workmen’s houses; it gets an adequate
return on its investment. The trouble is the native American does not
regard the immigrant as anything but a workman--and so long as he
ignores America’s interest in that man as a citizen, as a defender
of America, as a voter, as a future taxpayer, he is anti-American.
To these men, preaching patriotism and freedom in America must seem
the height of insincerity when contemplated from overcrowded rooms
under a leaky roof. Last Fourth of July the National Americanization
Committee instituted “Americanization Day” when native-born citizens
tendered receptions to foreign-born citizens. When foreign-born men
wrote saying that although they had been here many years it was the
first time they had shaken hands with an American, it demonstrated how
wide is the gulf of our prejudice and its consequent neglect. The pay
envelope has made a poor melting pot, and America is to-day paying the
cost of an experiment that has failed. Whenever we have established
lines that make our native Americans inaccessible to our foreign-born
residents, there we have established the unknown quantity in fixing
the responsibility for the immigrant standard of living, without which
knowledge the truth can never be ascertained.
What I am urging is this: Before we assert so calmly that the immigrant
lowers the American standard of living let us rest our case with the
man higher up--if need be with the financier who supplies the capital
and requires that all material conditions must be right, but who
forgets that in the last analysis the success of any enterprise depends
upon loyal, efficient workmen with a home stake in America.
Another native-American illusion is that the immigrant will not
appreciate our efforts. Since when has America based its principles of
action upon the flimsy desire for appreciation? Furthermore we expect
the appreciation to be out of all proportion to what we do. We have
indeed deteriorated when we have come to regard simple acts of justice,
fair play, service, obligation, and duty as acts to be persisted in
only when the immigrant is duly appreciative! Such a stimulus would
have done little to develop the northwest and to conquer the resources
of the country. The man who hesitates to build houses for his homeless
or commuting workmen because it may be paternalism, closes the
club-house he has provided because it is not appreciated, or bewails
his empty playground as a species of rank ingratitude. A great weakness
of the American character to-day is its desire for appreciation and
credit, and it does not make for Americanism.
A third American illusion is that the native American always thinks
of the immigrants as getting something from America--wages or liberty
or opportunity or rights. We forget that the majority of them come to
us as laborers, representing a net contribution of at least $1000,
which is the cost of raising a native-born child to the productive age.
In these days of prosperity, of new vision in business, of expansion
marked by a remarkable greatness of spirit, it is no time to forget
that the very industries which are at present by way of putting America
in the front ranks of trade and commerce are dependent upon immigrant
labor.
We know in a general way that the immigrant is the possessor of
much brawn and muscle. But it is characteristic of us that we think
of him always as a _job hunter_, not as a producer. His may be the
opportunity; but we never reflect that ours may be the profit. The
big mine owner, the subway contractor, the chief engineer of the
railroads, the canal builder have a practical knowledge of just where,
and how largely, the immigrant comes into new America’s scheme. But
the average American has no grasp of the full significance of the
immigrant’s immediate and present service to him and to the nation, in
a purely present and industrial way.
He knows that a big army of immigrants armed with pick and shovel is
down there in the subway cavity; and he knows that they build the roads
over which he spins his motor. Still he does not really grasp the fact
that the railroad that carries him, the clothes he wears, the cigars
he smokes, the furniture he puts in his house are made by immigrant
hands. Take iron and steel, the strategic industry, so to speak, in
America to-day. The Federal Immigration Commission found that 57.7 per
cent of the workmen in this industry were foreign born; and if you add
the workmen of foreign-born parentage, the percentage mounts to 71.7.
And so it goes through a long list of essential industries--in sugar
refining, 85 per cent of the workmen are foreign born; in bituminous
coal mining, 61.9 per cent; and so on. And there is no one to take
his place. There are to-day three jobs for every two workmen, and we
are calling out our reserve of women who have never before worked for
wages. We often hear of the displaced American workmen, but when we
look for them, we generally find they have moved up in the economic
scale.
_What other value are immigrants in American life?_ What percentage do
they possess of the social opportunity and liberty of America? What
percentage do they contribute to it? What percentage are they permitted
to contribute to it?
Some immigrants come to us with racial powers, instincts, and
susceptibilities, which, however modified by years of peasant toil,
have great potential value for America. Some come to us with vision
trained for centuries in beauty of line and color, with the skilled
hands of races that have been shaping arch or temple or cathedral for
thousands of years. They feel beauty and mobility of outline as only
those feel them who have lived with them for generations. What becomes
of these capacities over here? Does America give immigrants the chance
to use them? Does America even know they exist?
Another illusion is that the present races coming to America are not
easily assimilated, and should they be, they would give America an
undesirable type.
What, after all, is Americanism? What is the destiny of America? What
do we want it to be? What, in the great evolution of nations, is
it bound to be? Until the average American meets and answers these
questions squarely, we cannot settle the question of what races are
best for the future of America. Miss Repplier quotes Dr. Horace
Kallen as saying, “Only men who are alike in origin and spirit and
not abstractly can be truly equal, and maintain that inward unanimity
of action and outlook which makes a national life.” And, says Miss
Repplier, rightly, “We have no mutual understanding, no common
denominator.”
We have not. The first Americans whose opportunity, yes, and whose
_responsibility_ it was to produce these, have failed ignominiously to
do so. “An Englishman,” says Miss Repplier, “knows that a Russian Jew
cannot in five years or in twenty-five years become English; that his
standards and ideals are not convertible into English standards and
ideals. A Frenchman does not see in a Bulgarian or a Czech the making
of another Frenchman.”
True, but what is an American? Is he an Anglo-Saxon racial type, and if
so, by what law? _Do we desire him to be this?_
I do not despise the conclusion of ethnologists, but they seem to
have so few conclusions and so many theories. And the root of them
seems to be, not experience, but apprehension. Meanwhile, I see all
around me valiant Americans, Southern European by birth and tradition,
Americans now in spirit and loyalty and _tendency_. These men and women
have mastered the opportunity--for they had to seek and improve it
themselves--to become assimilated. In spite of the thousands of their
countrymen among us, still un-American, I am convinced of two things:
That America _can control its own destiny_, that one of the greatest
obstacles has been slothful neglect, another obstacle, nativism; and
that the way to attain control of our destiny is by aggressive, not
passive, Americanism. When this is under way, it will be easy enough
to sort out and deal separately and finally with undesirable races and
types or those that have no desire to become Americans.
In the midst of all our discussion of to-day about a prepared America,
there is no national policy emerging. We see Congress half-heartedly
bolstering up the army and navy. We see the Federal Bureau of
Immigration without adequate authority at work upon a Federal system of
employment exchanges, a system which can be overturned by successors in
office. We see the Bureau of Naturalization at work on a citizenship
program into which it jumps without preparation, preëmpting a field
long occupied by its neighbor in the Interior Department, the Bureau of
Education, without a suggestion of real coöperation. We see the Bureau
of Education with an unlimited field before it, hampered by state
lines and no funds. We have laws demanding that an alien shall learn
English and have a knowledge of the Constitution in order to become a
citizen, yet leaving it to the ward boss to supply the information. We
see the various departments dealing with various phases of preparedness
pursuing a path of departmental routine, waste, and duplication. No
clear uniform note runs through it all. There is little apparent
indication that times have changed and new issues and opportunities
are presented to our American government. We see the field of
transportation and distribution cut into small sections by local
regulations and local competition. One state is pitted against another
to secure labor for the development of the individual state--with no
thought of national needs.
Surely we cannot, in all fairness, expect the immigrant to distribute
himself wisely, to protect himself adequately, to educate himself
intelligently, to become a willing citizen without the full coöperation
of the native American. Yet upon this whole matter we have no national
sense of responsibility, no national consciousness. If a practical bill
providing for a national Americanization policy, to be administered
by national authority but leaving to states and counties and cities
their due rights and obligations, were at this moment before Congress,
it would have small chance of being considered. The trouble is that we
have no convinced body of native Americans behind it to support it.
We have not had a vision of many peoples making one nation, but rather
of a few people being worked for by others. Even kindhearted employers
with “welfare departments” for their men have little realization of
their immigrant workmen as future American people. In many cases the
welfare provisions and company housing specifically _do not apply_ to
the immigrant force. The average American housewife does not think
of the immigrant and her future in America when she needs a servant,
but wonders what nationality will suit her best. I should like to ask
how many of our housewives, even our suffragist housewives, know the
attitude of their foreign-born servants towards America or how well
they are fitted for citizenship? Are they regarded as a civic factor of
any importance? The average American officer regards the immigrant as
a trouble-maker; but how many cities compile their laws intelligently
in a language the immigrant can read, so that he may not become one? It
is the native-born American who must separate the wheat from the chaff
before we can estimate the wheat and dispose of the chaff.
We cannot treat the immigrant as if he were something to be absorbed,
automatically, by inevitable chemical reaction, in the course of time.
He is a living, changing, creative organism, _needing attention at
every minute, and with something to contribute at every point_. From
the moment he arrives in America he needs the _creative_, aggressive
attention of American institutions if he is to become a good American.
What he gets, when he gets anything, is a chance to touch here and
there American institutions adapted to a native-born population and
_barely fulfilling the needs of the native born_. Take the case of the
immigrant who arrives at Ellis Island and goes, let us say, to a New
England mill town. Originally it was a conservative little colonial
town of 1000 population with no large industries, and with schools,
churches, and a library adapted to the population. The introduction of
several factories increases the population fourfold, and 75 per cent
of the newcomers are foreign born, needing especially to profit by the
organized institutions of America. But what really happens is that
the institutions adapted to the original 1000 native Americans remain
exactly the same--schools, churches, library, court, and houses, for
the host of new Americans to fit into them as best they can. In other
words, although immigrants may make up from one half to two thirds of
that town they do not figure 10 per cent in its activities or 10 per
cent in its government or its facilities.
The native-born American has set up some very important and flourishing
institutions to perpetuate the ideals of Americanism and to preserve
the things dear to him. These have come also to be regarded as the
institutions for Americanizing the immigrant. If they Americanize
our native-born youth, why not our foreign-born peoples? The native
American has adapted them to his own needs and assumes that they will
do for every one. Will they, without any further attention on his part?
The public school comes first. It is the first aid to the nation. It
also represents a fundamental principle and obligation in American
civilization. Of the 13,000,000 men and women born in other lands,
3,000,000 of them were unable to speak English, according to the 1910
census, and only 38,000 were enrolled in our public schools to learn
it. Many important communities, in such important industrial states as
Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut, where the population is at
least one half immigrant, do not maintain _any_ classes whatever where
English can be learned.
Even where night schools exist, they are likely to be conducted in an
experimental or detached way--as a benevolent “extension” of the public
educational system rather than as a legitimate, highly important,
and necessary part of public policy. In a city in which 75 per cent
of the population is either foreign born or of foreign parentage,
the president of the board of education said this year: “More night
schools for foreigners--well, I don’t know. I am highly interested in
the technical night high schools. _If_ there is any money left after
these are fully organized, I will see that it goes into classes for
English to foreigners.”
But there never _is_ anything left. On that basis we shall get nowhere.
If the alien is to be taught English in this country only after every
form of education life is “fully organized”--he will by that time have
reached the point where he either cannot or will not be taught. When
will America learn that teaching immigrants English and requiring
them to learn it is a fundamental necessity, a condition of national
vitality?
The Bureau of Naturalization is publishing a statement that during the
past year 600 cities have conducted, initiated, or largely extended
night-school instruction for aliens. With the usual optimism we point
with pride to what America is doing with the native-American taxpayer’s
money. Do we not want to know how effective it is? In how many of these
600 cities has this night-school work been put on a basis adequate
to the numbers of the foreign-born population? In how many of the 600
has a really adequate system of instruction been worked out--adapted
to the needs, trades, shifts, hours of the men, providing for proper
classification, textbooks, teachers with vigor and understanding? How
long have the terms been and did the immigrants attend?
We should naturally expect New England to lead in this phase of an
Americanization policy. According to the data gathered by the Bureau
of Education in 1915, Maine had 15 towns with over 1000 foreign born
in the population, with no evening schools. Massachusetts had 28,
New Hampshire and Vermont each 6, and Rhode Island 4. In Connecticut
there are 15 towns with a foreign-born population of over 1000 that
have no evening school or other municipal provision for learning
citizenship and English. There is no town in the state that has
adequate or anything like adequate provisions for this. Yet New Haven
has approximately 50,000 foreign born, Bridgeport 40,000, Hartford
35,000, Meriden 10,000, Waterbury 25,000, Stamford 12,000. Concerning
Connecticut the lament of nativism that the “State is rapidly being
foreignized” is coming loud and strong. And it is true. How, with the
situation described above, could it be otherwise?
For the immigrant in the courts our cherished “equality before the
law” is not realized. There have been a great many studies and
investigations into the “immigrant’s influence on crime” and his
responsibility for this or that percentage of it. But there has never
been a constructive effort to make the machinery of the law adaptable
to the immigrant. With thoroughgoing nativism, the native-born
Americans have set up the kinds of courts they need for themselves, and
have installed forms of procedure that they know and understand. They
proceed on the assumption that every man knows the law, and that every
man can tell his tale in English. These assumptions were justified,
back in the days when our courts were founded. A man used to the
town-meeting scheme of government knew of what government consisted
and what it entailed. In answer to requests for interpreters, for
the distribution of information concerning laws, for modifications
of judgments where ignorance was the cause of the violation, we are
constantly met with the unsympathetic statement that if the system is
good enough for Americans and for America, it is good enough for the
Italians and the Germans and the Irish and the Jews and the Russians.
We so seldom think of laws and courts as educational, as incentives
to right doing, but always as punitive, even though this may be the
immigrant’s first contact with this leading American institution.
An immigrant lands in America and gets whatever work he can. He does
not know, and no governmental agency takes the trouble to tell him,
what particular restrictions there are on any given occupation. No
one explains to him for which job he has to have a license or which
occupations are open only to citizens. He does not know our ordinances
about the disposal of garbage or ashes. He may come from a region
where there are no free schools, and he does not know that the law in
this country obliges him to send his children to school. Unwittingly,
with the best intentions in the world, he may offend in almost every
relation of his life. Suppose that he does offend and is brought into
court. If he cannot speak English, he is supposed to rely on the court
interpreter. In many places there is no court interpreter. In Chicago,
a short time ago, an investigation of courts disclosed the fact that
the judge sometimes had to order volunteer interpreters to leave the
room because they were interpreting wrongly time after time. The judges
stated that there were a few men of that kind who made a practice of
hanging around the courts and interpreting wrongly whenever it was to
their advantage to do so.
Unable to make himself understood, and without competent and honest
assistance from an interpreter, the alien is placed at an additional
disadvantage in our courts. Ignorant of his rights, not understanding
what his offense is, he is tried and convicted, and leaves the court
wondering what he has done that justifies it in branding him as a
law breaker. His respect for American law and for American justice
does not outlive many experiences of this kind, and another door to
Americanism is closed.
Our journals are also nativistic. We are known as a country ruled and
governed by our newspapers, which are said to be able to make and
unmake political parties, and to raise a politician or statesman to a
dizzy pinnacle of fame or else to cast him headlong into oblivion. The
average paper has page after page--on Saturdays and Sundays, section
after section--full of articles that are suggestive and instructive to
those who have their bearings already, but a helpless, hopeless maze
to those who have come to America so recently that they still need an
occasional signpost to guide them through our political mazes. It seems
to be assumed that the readers know the form, the history, the value,
and the significance of American institutions, and need only to have
them attended to or referred to, the more casually the better. Some of
our most significant journals take apparent pride in being cryptic.
They ignore the presence in this country of millions who need to be
informed, who ardently desire information, about our history and our
institutions, and who do not know where they can obtain it from an
English-speaking source.
About 9,000,000 people in this country read foreign-language
newspapers. Some of them are persons who read these papers largely
from necessity while they are learning English, and some of them never
intend to learn, and never do learn, English at all. An immigrant who
arrives in this country without being able to speak English finds
that it takes a considerable time to learn it--the length of time
depending on the place he finds work in and the people he works with.
Now in this period, long or short, which must elapse before the alien
learns English, the foreign-language newspaper could be an invaluable
Americanizing agent. But it cannot be so without the coöperation of the
native press and native Americans. And that we have never given. Our
big manufacturers advertise in thousands of these papers to sell goods.
Otherwise we do not concern ourselves with them at all, except to
regard _all_ with suspicion when we learn of the disloyalty of _one_.
Many of the editors of these papers, themselves not Americanized in
any complete sense, are making inadequate but persistent efforts to
connect their people with American institutions to lead them to become
Americans, real citizens of this republic. They get little help from
us. The American press is increasingly proud of its position as one of
the very greatest of our social institutions. It is run for labor, for
capital, for society, for business, for the man in the street; but it
is run very little for the foreign-born citizen or alien who against
odds is trying to accomplish his own assimilation. Yet this is exactly
the task in which the newspaper that considered his interests and his
needs could help him most.
The public library, especially in cities where public school branches
are maintained, has a great opportunity to reach the adult immigrant
in his own neighborhood, in community reading rooms, by providing
newspapers, books in the native language, simple books about America,
either in English or translated into the native tongue. Whenever public
library facilities are extended to immigrants, there is ample testimony
to the enthusiasm with which they are received. A few years ago the
management of the New York City public library in a very interesting
report gave some startling figures covering the patronage of the
public libraries by the foreign born of New York City, showing that
they were exceptionally eager and persistent readers, and of the more
serious forms of literature--history, philosophy, science, and drama.
In hundreds of industrial towns of the country the public library is
a virtual mausoleum, a monument to culture, little used but “always
there.” Whole sections of the town that have never found the way to the
library, and who might not be made welcome if they did, are starving
for some recreative interest, some sources of information which they
could manage.
But here occurs a stumblingblock. The native American has a prejudice
against furnishing books in a foreign language and often proceeds on
the theory that although he does nothing to furnish facilities for
learning English, it is better that the immigrant should read nothing
while he waits.
It is idle to fear that the foreign-language book is an obstacle to
Americanization. Anything that increases the alien’s intelligence, and
especially his information about America, is an aid, not a hindrance.
Outside of the large cities few libraries have any collection of
foreign books. Those that do are likely to have an entirely academic
or classical assortment. A few weeks ago, in investigating the public
library facilities of one of our big steel towns, now given over to the
production of munitions, it was discovered that the foreign language
“collection” adapted to the races in the town consisted of one Polish
book. In one industrial town which is heavily immigrant a public
library a few weeks ago opened a branch in a foreign bank--and, as
might be expected, it is flourishing.
One of the chief American grievances against the immigrant is that he
does not spend or invest his money here. Until the establishment of the
postal savings banks he had little encouragement to do so. Here again
we cling stubbornly to our nativism, and maintain that arrangements
that are satisfactory to the native born are good enough for the
foreign born as well. Few banks have foreign departments, although of
late the number is increasing. The ordinary bank is not adapted to the
immigrant. He is intimidated by it and is not always welcome. That
59 per cent of the present investors in the Postal Savings Banks are
foreign born, and that this 59 per cent owns 72 per cent of all the
money now on deposit is significant proof that the immigrant _will_ use
our banks as an institution.
If I have given the impression that the entire responsibility for
Americanism is the native American’s, I have failed in my purpose. I
have but attempted to restore the balance and point out the really
controlling factor in Americanism.
If I have failed to note the many very important and excellent
movements now under way in the name of reform and paid by benevolence,
it is not that I underestimate their value. It is because I want the
native American to realize that reform and philanthropy are no more
now to be the custodians of Americanism than when the Declaration of
Independence was signed. It is the average business man in his plant
and the average official in his government office that must preserve it
in every thought, act, and ambition of the day’s routine work--carrying
always the overhead charge of patriotism and nationalism.
This fixing of initial responsibility does not mean that the immigrant
has no responsibility. Far from it. He must be ready to stay in
America, to become a citizen, to adopt American standards, to obey
our laws, to meet his obligations, to do his duty, to assume his
responsibilities for, as well as to exercise, his rights. But he must
know what these are. He must realize that the native American knows
what they are and will set him a good example. He must be told that
he is expected to meet the requirements or America does not want him
and will not keep him. Our admission and exclusion laws serve no such
notice on him. The literacy test is a plain evasion of the native
American’s responsibility and a lazy way of thinking out the problem.
We native Americans in business or in office have never addressed
ourselves seriously to the task of making Americans or nationalizing
America. When we do, we shall have as strong a nation as we have
bridges and railways and banks.
It is possible that we have been admitting too many people of too wide
a variety for the native American to Americanize. It is certainly true
that we should hesitate to admit many others until we have demonstrated
our ability to provide an assimilation policy for the nation. We cannot
forever depend upon the missionary for the Americanization of aliens.
Shall we close the doors as the only way to preserve Americanism? Will
this be a confession of our utter failure to deal in a statesmanlike
way with either the international or national situation which confronts
us?
It seems to me that our real enemy is not an aggressive foreignism,
but a passive, complacent Americanism or nativism. What we really need
to fear is, not that we shall be invaded by civilizations and ideals
we cannot assimilate, but that we shall fail to develop and perpetuate
and extend to all Americans the civilization and the ideals we firmly
believe to be American.
I consider that a most dangerous fallacy in this country to-day is the
belief that the evils that have overtaken us through the immigrant are
the result of an undue expansion of our hospitality, an undue breadth
of interpretation of America as the land of liberty, open to all.
What we are really suffering from is not undue expansion but undue
contraction, a determined withdrawal of native Americans from the real
situation in America, a positive refusal to face their destiny, a
stupid neglect to provide anything for the immigrant but a job.
It seems to me the height of complacent nativism to ascribe our social
and political evils to unrestricted immigration, when as a matter
of fact we have never developed facilities for assimilating them or
given the matter much constructive attention of any kind. We have no
information concerning the numbers and kinds of immigrants which our
country and our institutions can assimilate, and until we have these we
are not in a position for judgment.
I believe emphatically that unless America can show itself worthy
of its traditions and opportunities, we should not be honored nor
sought as “an asylum for the oppressed,” nor be regarded as “a refuge
from tyranny,” and that we should close our doors and put up a sign
that means what we say. I am equally positive that we should give
a constructive policy a fair trial--starting at Ellis Island and
following the alien to the last hamlet with information, advice, and
protection, with assurance of equality before the law in all respects,
and giving him the full guarantees of our Constitution. If under these
conditions he prefers his home language to ours, pays his allegiance
to a country other than America, sends his savings home to be invested,
persists in a second-rate standard of living, asserts his rights but
refuses to meet his duties, reads the foreign language press instead of
the American, joins the racial society instead of the city club,--then
we shall know the fault is not the native American’s, and we can put up
the bars with a clear conscience and with courage in our hearts.
Americanism faces the future and is courageous. Nativism faces the past
and is apprehensive. Never in the history of nations shall we have a
greater opportunity to attain stability and leadership than now. The
native American has in his own hands the power to build a great future
for his land. He has the needed qualities, too; he has an idealism
such as the world never witnessed before, in so high a degree as to
seem naïve or childish to citizens of older races dyed in intrigue and
used to always looking for the hidden motive under every apparently
open move. He has courage and a faith in liberty detached though it
sometimes is from his daily life. And I am one of those who hold that
he still believes in equality--in spite of the manifold contradictions
we see all about us.
But he is, as we have seen, blind beyond parallel to his
opportunities--to a degree that makes us question sometimes whether he
has not, after all, committed the unpardonable sin of sinning against
the light. He has been stupid, foolish, trivial. He has been content
to treat his belief in liberty and equality as many a man treats his
religion--as something precious, but not to be used in daily life.
It is not too late for the American to face about from his nativism,
from his contentment with considering only the needs and interests
of the native born, and to consider the needs of America as a whole,
America as he sees it and meets it every day, in his shop or mill,--the
America of the native born _and the foreign born as well_. Let him but
recognize once for all that the foreigner’s needs are the same as his
needs, that everyone wants a decent home and a place to sit in, and
book or paper to read, a safe place to keep his savings, a chance for
himself and his family to keep well,--all the varied needs of the body
and the soul,--let him but recognize that the alien and the native-born
both need and desire these things, and then make it his responsibility
to provide them and the battle will be won.
_We_ are the great adventure of the twentieth century. And the foes we
have to fear are not the hosts that come to us to profit by our liberty
and opportunity, but the lack of wisdom and of courage that makes us
unfit to administer our heritage and to meet our destiny. Nativism is
no substitute for Americanism.