THE POPULAR VOTE
We are facing a national election in which the “vote of the people”
will decide the future of America more certainly than at any election
since the Civil War. One of the most vital questions before us this
year is: Will the foreign-born vote tend to solidarity and be cast in
racial interests, or will it be cast for America along broad lines of
national policy? Will the 1500 foreign-language newspapers influence
the foreign-born vote in favor of a national policy or will it attempt
to influence it along racial lines?
The returns of the next national election should have an important
bearing upon our future immigration policy of admission. Should
we find the vote tending to solidify along racial lines then we
have an additional reason for insisting upon the development of an
assimilation policy if we are to continue to admit aliens. The
racial vote may prove to be a far more anti-American influence than
the foreign colony. America cannot afford to have an Irish vote, a
German-American vote, a Jewish vote, cast _en bloc_ for any measures or
man, if Americanism as defined in the Declaration of Independence and
Federal Constitution is to prevail.
The issues promise to center more about candidates than platforms.
Parties will impress us more as election machinery than as vehicles
of any really fundamental ideals and program. We shall probably have
three measures of preparedness from which to choose. There will be a
sincere, genuine program of preparedness, including international duty,
Americanism, and preparation at home carried by the Republicans, to fit
its candidate, and probably indorsed by the Progressives. There will be
a milder course, a kind of middle-of-the-road preparedness carried by
the Democrats, in the hope of holding their own. The indications are
now that there will be a third party of pacifists, anti-preparedness at
most points, which will include the ultra-contented, the discontented,
and a considerable socialist and labor following. Each platform will
doubtless carry some planks dealing with “pressing national questions”
as ballast, but few voters will consider them seriously. The main issue
of preparedness will determine the lines of the vote, because America
now knows that all of its internal progress and “reform” depend upon an
America that can defend itself. Belgium drove that lesson home. Through
the intricate paths of American honor, international duty, adequate
preparedness, national service, universal training, Mexican strategy,
the American voter must wend his way. He will be beset at every turn by
the “record of the administration and of Congress,” interpreted first
one way and then another by the propaganda of defense organizations and
of their opponents. He will be deluged with accurate and inaccurate
information, from which he will find it difficult to select the best.
He will be bombarded with literature, and enticed to meetings and will
be given promises hard to keep in 1917. Within the next few months he
will receive more gratuitous condensed education on all these questions
than during the entire time since 1912.
In addition to all this confusion of mind and competitive struggle,
prevailing about the native-born voter, the foreign-born voter will
be torn by loyalties and sympathies which go back many generations to
the fatherland. Most of them have some one dear to them at the front
or lying dead on some battle field. Their mail is censored and they
often do not know who is dead and who is living or what has happened to
their little homestead in the old country. They see ammunition going
out of America, not to fight their battles, but to kill some of their
countrymen. They see America growing rich from this manufacture. They
are only waiting the first assurance of peace to go back and see what
has happened or to help their home country.
It is inevitable that some expression of this should find voice at the
polls, and the question is how to make the American issues so fine
and big and strong and world compelling that they will engulf this
great human sorrow and devotion and make it of service to America.
How can we in this next election make every voter feel that America
is for him--to serve, to guard, to use, so we may stem the great tide
of discontent, aversion, and desertion which has set in among our
foreign-born voters? How can we in this coming election remove the
indifference, irresponsibility, and profit seeking which characterizes
our native-born voter?
Now that we face the crisis and know the necessity, we look with
amazement and alarm at what our preparation has been. We turn to our
schools and ask them what they have been doing in the way of preparing
the voter--what has he been taught about America and its government,
institutions, and opportunities? How have these been related to his own
local civic life? What sense of national service has he acquired in
his town school? Alas--we find there is nothing held so cheap as the
American vote, and the last form of preparedness is that for voting. Of
the American boy we require that he shall be born here, and shall be
21 years of age. We assume that somehow the public school, which he
is required to attend in some states only, will teach him the value of
the vote and how to use it, and something of his duties and obligations
to his country. We also assume that the boy’s parents will educate him
along these lines. To the girl in most states we deny the vote for
apparently no reasons other than precedent, prejudice, conjecture, or
apprehension.
There is no ceremony, no pledge of allegiance, no occasion made
patriotically memorable in the mind of the boy when he casts his
first vote. No one makes him welcome as a citizen of the country. He
registers in his home town in an automatic way, and if he thinks of
voting in the future as an obnoxious duty that interferes with his
business or week ends, it is surely not entirely his own fault.
In some schools there is an increasing attempt to bring his rather
localized experience into relation to the broader questions of the day,
and into the national political life, but the mass of boys depend upon
the newspapers and such discussion as they stimulate or hear among
their fellows. This is good so far as it goes, but it is too critical,
too superficial, too opinionated, too provincial to serve the great
national need of America in the crucial test of elections. Despite
our many thousands of educational organizations it is very difficult
to obtain an impartial and scientific statement on any political
controversy. There are many briefs for one side or the other, but few
impartial statements that are not special pleading.
The indifference and ignorance of the native-born voter are real
impediments to Americanism. A vote is a practical thing requiring as
much knowledge and experience in its use as any other responsible act
of life. You cannot teach a man to handle a gun by a series of lectures
on the ethics of warfare. Neither can you teach a man to handle a vote
by the average treatise on civil government.
In our failure to find this training in the public school, we turn next
to the political school, the club, the district organization. Here we
find every mechanism possible for getting the vote and holding it, but
practically none for training or instructing that vote. It is easy to
find a dozen men to help a prospective voter to obtain his citizenship
papers, but very difficult to find one man or an institution to educate
him in Americanism and English, enabling him to qualify. It is easy
to find men who condemn the sinking of the _Lusitania_ and watchful
waiting in Mexico, but hard to find a man who has a clear, practical
idea of how he will register that protest in November. Thousands will
vote for Mr. Roosevelt as their protest in case he is nominated. But
suppose Mr. Roosevelt is not nominated. Have they thought of their next
effective protest at the polls? Justice Hughes perhaps. But who knows
where he stands on these questions? Those of us who have worked with
him as governor of New York, and knew him, take no risks, but how about
the average voter who has no such knowledge and must make up his own
mind?
As shown in the preceding chapter the acquiring of citizenship by
aliens does not have for its main object the vote. To him, it is
connected more closely with a job, with getting on in America, with
freedom from the tyranny of his own country and from military service,
and with gain. The power of the vote is, generally speaking, an
unknown quantity to him, until he has been here some time--often it
represents something which he can sell, or which he has to have to
keep his job--ideals set before him by some native American. It is a
rather curious thing that the padrone system had its real origin in
our political rather than in our industrial system. The padrone is
a labor boss who furnishes men to industrial organizations, and in
return for keeping up the supply of men, has the privilege of housing
and feeding them--making his profit from the employment fees, housing,
and supplies. The padrone, however, is usually a political leader, not
in the camp or quarry or mine where the industry is located, but in
the city, which is the source of the supply of men. It was generally
understood that the padrone, in return for the contract to furnish men,
would deliver the foreign-born vote in his district in favor of the
candidate acceptable to the company with whom he had contracted. He saw
to it that his countrymen were naturalized and how they voted. In this
way the position of the padrone became impregnable.
If a community as a whole fails to use the immigrant as a political
and citizenship asset, some other force in the community is fairly
sure to awaken to his political usefulness. The only way in which a
community can “control” its alien vote is by controlling preparation
for citizenship. Most communities, far from controlling it, have not
yet developed interest in it. The American community, without night
schools, without interest, without responsibility for the Americanism
of one third or one half of its residents, is the real parent of this
“alien” vote.
The ignorance of the newly naturalized voter is different from that
of the American. But like the indifference and ignorance of the
American voter, the ignorance of the foreign voter is largely a social
matter, and is subject to the same remedies. In other words, it is
not _merely_ instruction in English and Civics, the usual preparation
for citizenship, that makes an immigrant a good voter or a bad one.
A very _great deal depends upon his social background_, upon the
understanding and point of view he has been able to develop as a result
of his contacts with American institutions and American community life.
To develop a social understanding large enough and deep enough to make
a man grasp readily a national political issue in all its importance,
and the subtler aspects of community issues and legislation, when they
come up to the vote, is a tremendous task--not a task that even a very
intelligent and educated immigrant can compass for himself. This, in
a political sense, is the heart of our present difficulty with the
naturalized voter. His social assimilation has not been sufficiently
thorough to give him the background he needs at the polls or to enable
him to find himself among the various political parties and sub-parties.
Now, the average voter is too thoroughly localized. In other words,
his political status in America is very much like his social status.
He becomes fixed in a neighborhood, a colony, a ward, and he never
learns to think of himself _nationally_. Politically, the issues
are presented to him in the impersonation of local figures and
interests--Max Schroeder at the corner saloon, or Tim Connolly of the
Labor Council. National issues are invariably translated in ward terms
and the immigrant accepts them at this valuation. After this kind of
political tradition has persisted for a few generations the result is
a community or colony of hopelessly provincial voters, keenly alive to
the immediate practical profit or loss involved in any political issue,
almost oblivious of the fact that the greatest good to the greatest
number is the thing for which the citizen of a Republic is to vote if
he is to fulfill his republicanism.
The social education of Americans is difficult enough. We need to
Americanize the American voter quite as much as the foreign. But with
the immigrant the problem of social education as a prerequisite to
political freedom and competence is a far more difficult thing. The
truth is that nobody can coach him in American life. He needs to live
it and must be allowed to do so, if we are to have competent voters. In
proportion to the breadth of his human contacts, and to the number and
variety of American institutions which he touches he will be informed
upon those subjects and points of view that fit him for the actual
exercise of the vote.
This is a social responsibility on the part of America toward its
foreign-born citizens. It does not belong to the courts, or, to any
great degree, to the schools. These two agencies are to see to it
that the candidate for naturalization knows and can use the English
language, is of good moral character, and is “attached to the
principles of the Constitution.” But at the best, the preparation for
and the process of naturalization alone does not Americanize, does not
qualify a man for the American _vote_ in nation, state, or city.
With some sense of this, the schools that prepare for citizenship
have within the last year been revising their courses in “civics” for
aliens. They have put aside the paraphrases of the Constitution which
have been the traditional textbooks for these classes and they have
evolved a system of “community civics” designed to teach the alien his
privileges and responsibilities in their simplest form, with direct
reference to his everyday life and his own immediate points of contact
with the laws of public health, of property, of parents’ obligations,
etc.
This is a much-needed movement. But it should be accompanied by
some organized effort to make the immigrant voters of this country
an entirely intelligent political force. I am referring of course
to the great body of adult immigrants _who have attained most of
their education in this country, outside of work hours_. It would be
invidious to suggest that certain of our immigrant voters need any
assistance whatever for intelligent voting.
How can we best put the newly naturalized immigrant, alert,
well-intentioned, but usually socially and politically unassimilated,
in touch with the political issues of the day in their large national
bearings, and in their practical expression.
_I should like to see the political forum, in its best form, become a
recognized part of American life._ It is needed for the native born.
It is practically indispensable for the foreign born. It would not
be non-partisan, nor attempt to be. The forums would be conducted by
the parties separately, but always openly, regularly, as a routine
of community series of meetings for discussion and information. And
the party that did its educational work best, and placed its ideas
and objects most frankly in the light, would in the long run get the
votes. But it would have to be a sustained piece of work, carried on
from year to year, with quite as much zeal and quite as much _sustained
party support_ after elections as before. The most significant effort
made in this direction was tried by the Progressive Party through its
Progressive Service.[1] This educational division carried on political
educational work throughout the country and drafted legislation, though
it was not in office nor directly responsible to the people for its
enactment. It failed temporarily because the average voter does not
yet respond to national issues in the absence of danger and conflict;
of controversy and emergency. He has been too long taught that he can
learn all he needs to know at election time. This attempt to realize an
ideal ahead of its time has suffered defeat but temporarily. So long
as the party system prevails there will exist a need for political
education by parties. How long it will be before leaders are freed from
the spoils system and recognize this obligation cannot be foretold.
[1] “A New Spirit in Party Organization.” _The North American Review_,
June, 1914.
Athens feared that if the town hall grew too small to hold a
convocation of the people, Hellenic democracy would perish from the
earth. Here in America we cannot revert to the town meeting. But in
the interests of Americanism, I believe the political parties of this
country will be forced, by the developing intelligence of public
sentiment, to create systems of party education which will have to
bear the light of day--and the challenge of severe competition. Party
education now means campaign literature, speeches only by candidates
or for them, a virulent emotionalism which even the unsophisticated
voter no longer takes seriously. A party “stands firm” for “social and
industrial justice” for all men and women alike. But these same men
and women, who do _not_ attend conventions, who are sorely in need of
social and industrial justice or who would like to help in securing
it for others, never learn what its concrete definition is, or how to
secure it through the vote. Our political parties need, first of all,
_great leaders_. And after the great leaders we need an informed and
alert and sensitive citizen body, insistent for information, undismayed
by long ballot sheets, at home among political ideas. We need party
laboratories, publicists not advertisers, a thoroughgoing machinery for
getting studies and facts and opinions to people in a form in which
they can weigh and use them.
The very introduction of the word “political” revives the conventional
fear that the immigrant will be “used” in dark and dangerous ways. It
is certainly true that he has been. But what America really needs to
face with greater apprehension is the immigrant that is _not used_. The
time has passed for a negative position. How is the political force
of the foreign-born residents and citizens to be intelligently and
practically connected with the body politic? It is folly to let our
fear of the word “political” justify our gross neglect of the political
intelligence and potential power of from one third to one half the
population of many of our important cities and towns. The _use_ of the
immigrant politically is more likely than anything else to put an end
to the political _abuse of_ him.
Many Americans have taken some satisfaction during late years in
attributing radical votes and platforms to the foreign born. And yet in
the last presidential election Ohio, with a population of about half
that of New York, and with a native-born percentage of 87.4 as against
New York’s 69.8, cast 27,000 more votes for the Socialist candidate. In
that election, New York state, with a foreign-born population of 30 per
cent, gave the Socialist candidate a vote amounting to seven tenths of
one per cent of its total population. In the same year Kansas, with a
foreign-born population of 8 per cent, gave the Socialist candidate a
vote amounting to seven tenths of one per cent of its total population,
or twice the New York Socialist vote. Oklahoma, with a native-born
population of 97.6 per cent, cast a Socialist vote amounting to 2¹⁄₂
per cent of its population, or nearly four times the ratio for New
York, nearly twice the ratio for Illinois, where the foreign born are
one fifth of the population, and two and one half times the ratio for
Pennsylvania, where the foreign-born population is almost one fifth of
the total.
One of the most dangerous conditions--at least potentially--concerning
the alien vote we have deliberately brought upon ourselves. In ten
states of the Union we have been for years allowing immigrants to vote
upon their first papers. In the last presidential election declarants
voted in Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, South
Dakota, Texas, Oregon, and Wisconsin. The result has been shameless
grafting and fraud. In Nebraska the alien in order to vote need only
have been in the state six months, and have made his declaration thirty
days before election. In other words, an Italian or Russian or Pole or
Armenian or Turk who landed at Ellis Island about six months before
the last presidential election--say in April, 1912--and who went out
to Nebraska at once and lived there until fall, making his declaration
in October, could have voted at the last presidential election; _and
this absolutely without reference to whether he knew a word of English,
understood a single provision of the Constitution, or knew even the
name of the political party with which he was voting_.
The one great fact that stands out is this: That the voting quality of
a number of our states is not and never has been subject to review,
from the point of view of _national_ political ideals, of Americanism.
So long as we have citizens of states that vote who are not citizens
of the nation, we have a disrupting force in our national political
organization. Citizenship in the United States is constitutionally
defined in Amendment 14 thus: “All persons born or naturalized in the
United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of
the United States, and of the states in which they reside.” No other
kind of citizenship is provided for in the Constitution. A state may
need voters, and undoubtedly many of the first-paper men, pioneers
in our western states, have voted wisely and well, with a grasp of
local conditions. But because of the greater variety in our present
immigration as compared with that of former years, and because American
citizenship, including the power to vote, is a matter for national
valuation, a state should no more arrogate unto itself the power to
make its own citizens than to coin its own money or set up its own
postal system. The time has come for conscious statesmanship, for
international purposeful dealing with this fundamental element in our
political organization.
A situation quite as much in need of national review concerns the
relation of women to citizenship. An immigrant woman, no matter what
her educational qualifications or length of residence in this country,
becomes a citizen by the act of her husband or father’s naturalization.
This means in eleven states of the Union that she can vote at all
elections. But immigrant women are very generally years behind the
men in Americanization. They lack not only the social assimilation
which makes them fit to vote, but even the technical requirements for
citizenship, which their husbands or fathers have at least mastered.
And yet of 3,723,971 possible women voters in the suffrage states,
902,129 are foreign born--one quarter of the whole number. Of late
a number of our western suffragist leaders have assured us that the
immigrant woman makes a good voter--that she is conscientious about
going to the polls, and seems to take a direct and personal interest in
registering her opinion on matters that she knows to affect the welfare
of her home, her husband, her children. But there are many thousands
of immigrant women in this country who have not mastered the English
language in even a small degree, who have had no opportunity to learn
our civic ideals, whose homes are not American homes. The thing that
concerns us is not that this vote of immigrant women will corrupt our
political situation. It is rather to lament that so much civic force
and interest, of inestimable value in political rating, is lost to the
community and to the nation.
We must know and direct the political forces, or we shall direct the
social and civic forces in vain. “Civic consciousness” is coming to be
too diluted a quantity, too general, too philosophic, too “broad” and
non-partisan to act promptly or definitely. It stands for too much,
directs too little. The civic welfare of towns has become separate from
their political welfare. And the real danger of the salutary modern
social and civic movements that are spreading through our cities and
towns is that it tends to become so. Most American towns, as such,
never think of their immigrants, representing one third or one half
of the town in numbers, as voters or as potential voters--or make any
effort to bring their force into play in any national way, as a part of
public sentiment. They are left to the by-ways of politics. And it is
small wonder if they learn the habit and tricks of the by-ways.
Hundreds of immigrants in small towns to-day are getting their
political education from just two sources: the ward boss, who tells
them no more than he thinks they need to know; and the foreign language
newspaper, which is _published in the big city and circulated_ in
hundreds of small towns over a wide radius. There are at least 1500
such papers in the country, reaching more than 9,000,000 regular
readers daily. Many of them have an acknowledged political interest
and trend--witness the vigor of the campaign editorials now beginning
to appear with such calculated timeliness. Many of the editors of
these papers regard it as their first charge to instruct their fellow
countrymen in the political events and tendencies and issues of
America. But a very great many of these editors are themselves not
initiated in these things. The force that guides the immigrant to the
polls must come more directly and warmly from the American center of
American affairs.
The American attitude of indifference to the vote, of refusal to
consider it a national privilege and a national service, is at bottom
responsible for our difficulties with the immigrant vote. When that
changes, and the force of the change carries through the political
world, the American vote will be regenerated among native and foreign
born alike. I should make the occasion of giving an immigrant the
vote the occasion for insisting upon the duties that must go with the
exercise of it. At present the immigrant is too much in possession
of the idea that it is a right and a privilege--partly sold to him,
and which it is his privilege--or duty--to sell or contribute to his
benefactors or superiors in return.
The problem before the political parties has long been how to extend
the social ideal and how to make it count in the body politic. The
“politicians” of vigor and imagination cherish a practical hope of
organizing the idealism of men, restoring human belief and values to
party organization. In the peculiar opportunity now presented to the
country to take stock of its citizenship, to reënforce its unity, to
justify itself as a democracy, to make the most of its powers, to
use the intelligence and the ardor of its citizens of many races,
and to bring the newest of these into accord with its ideals and its
practices, lies a great opportunity for the political parties of this
country. By an organized effort to instruct newly naturalized citizens
in the use of the American vote, and to bring them into real accord
with the social forces behind the vote, we shall secure Americanism in
politics, without which we can have no genuine preparedness.