Twenty-five years ago I knew but dimly that the United States existed.
My first dream of it came, as well as I remember, from the strange gay
flag that blew above a circus tent on the Fair Green. It was a Wild West
Show, and for years I associated America with the intoxication of the
circus and, for no reason, with the tang of oranges. "Two a penny, two a
penny, large penny oranges! Buy away an' ate away, large penny oranges!"
They were oranges from Seville then, but the odor of them and the fumes
of circus excitement gave me a first gay ribald sense of the United
States.
The next allied sense was gathered from a scallawag uncle. He had sought
his fortune in America--sought it, as I infer now, on the rear end of a
horse-car. When he came home he was full of odd and delicious oaths.
"Gosh hell hang it" was his chief touch of American culture. He was a
"Yank" in local parlance, a frequently drunken Yank. His fine drooping
mustache too often drooped with porter. Once, a boy of nine, I steadied
him home under the October stars and absorbed a long alcoholic reverie
on the Horseshoe Falls. As we slept together that night in the
rat-pattering loft, and as he absently appropriated all the
horse-blanket, I had plenty of chance to shiver over the wonderments of
the Horseshoe Falls.
This, with an instilled idea that America and America alone could offer
"work," foreshadowed the American landscape. It is the bald hope of work
that finally magnetizes us hither. But every dream and every loyalty was
with the unhappy land from which I came.
For many months the music of New York harbor spoke only of home. Every
outgoing steamer that opened its throat made me homesick. America was
New York, and New York was down town, and down town was a vortex of new
duties. There I learned the bewildering foreign tongue of earning a
living, and the art of eating at Childs'. At night the hall-bedroom near
Broadway, and the resourceless promenade up and down Broadway for
amusement. The only women to say "dear," the women who say it on the
street.
In Chicago, not in New York, I found the United States. The word
"settlement" gave me my first puzzled intimation that there was
somewhere a clew to this grim struggle down town. I had looked for it in
boarding-houses. I had looked for it in stenographic night-schools. I
had sought it in the blotchy Sunday newspaper, in Coney Island, in long
jaunts up the Palisades. I had looked for it among the street-walkers,
the first to proffer intimacy. And of course, not being clever enough, I
had overlooked it. But in Chicago, as I say, I came on it at home.
America dawned for me in a social settlement. It dawned for me as a
civilization and a faith. In all my first experiences of my employers I
got not one glimpse of American civilization. Theirs was the language of
smartness, alertness, brightness, success, efficiency, and I tried to
learn it, but it was a difficult and alien tongue. Some of them were
lawyers, but they were interested in penmanship and ability to clean
ink-bottles. Some of them were business men, but they were interested in
ability to typewrite and to keep the petty cash. It was not their fault.
Ours was not an affair of the heart. But if it had not been for the
social settlement, I should still be an alien to the bone.
Till I knew a social settlement the American flag was still a flag on a
circus-tent, a gay flag but cheap. The cheapness of the United States
was the message of quick-lunch and the boarding-house, of vaudeville and
Coney Island and the Sunday newspaper, of the promenade on Broadway. In
the social settlement I came on something entirely different. Here on
the ash-heap of Chicago was a blossom of something besides success. The
house was saturated in the perfume of the stockyards, to make it sweet.
A trolley-line ran by its bedroom windows, to make it musical. It was
thronged with Jews and Greeks and Italians and soulful visitors, to make
it restful. It was inhabited by high-strung residents, to make it easy.
But it was the first place in all America where there came to me a sense
of the intention of democracy, the first place where I found a flame by
which the melting-pot melts. I heard queer words about it. The men, I
learned, were mollycoddles, and the women were sexually unemployed. The
ruling class spoke of "unsettlement workers" with animosity, the
socialists of a mealy-mouthed compromise. Yet in that strange haven of
clear humanitarian faith I discovered what I suppose I had been
seeking--the knowledge that America had a soul.
How one discovers these things it is hard to put honestly. It is like
trying to recall the first fair wind of spring. But I know that slowly
and unconsciously the atmosphere of the settlement thawed out the
asperity of alienism. There were Americans of many kinds in residence,
from Illinois, from Michigan, from New York, English-Americans,
Russian-Americans, Austrian-Americans, German-Americans, men who had
gone to Princeton and Harvard, women spiritually lavendered in Bryn
Mawr. The place bristled with hyphens. But the Americanism was of a kind
that opened to the least pressure from without, and never shall I forget
the way these residents with their "North Side" friends had managed so
graciously to domesticate the annual festival of my own nationality.
That, strange though it may seem, is the more real sort of
Americanization Day.
From Walt Whitman, eventually, the naturalizing alien breathes in
American air, but I doubt if I should have ever known the meaning of
Walt Whitman had I not lived in that initiating home. It was easy in
later years to see new meanings in the American flag, to stand with
Ethiopia Saluting the Colors, but it was in the settlement I found the
sources from which it was dyed. For there, to my amazement, one was not
expected to believe that man's proper place is on a Procrustean bed of
profiteering. A different tradition of America lived there, one in which
the earlier faiths had come through, in which the way to heaven was not
necessarily up a skyscraper. In New England, later, I found many ideas
of which the settlement was symptomatic, but as I imbibed them they were
"America" for me.
What it means to come at last into possession of Lincoln, whose spirit
is so precious to the social settlement, is probably unintelligible to
Lincoln's normal inheritors. To understand this, however, is to
understand the birth of a loyalty. In the countries from which we come
there have been men of such humane ideals, but they have almost without
exception been men beyond the pale. The heroes of the peoples of Europe
have not been the governors of Europe. They have been the spokesmen of
the governed. But here among America's governors and statesmen was a
simple authenticator of humane ideals. To inherit him becomes for the
European not an abandonment of old loyalties, but a summary of them in a
new. In the microcosm of the settlement perhaps Lincolnism is too
simple. Many of one's promptest acquiescences are revised as one meets
and eats with the ruling class later on. But the salt of this American
soil is Lincoln. When one finds that, one is naturalized.
It is curious how the progress of naturalization becomes revealed to
one. I still recollect with a thrill the first time I attended a
national political convention and listened to the roll-call of the
States. "Alabama! Arizona! Arkansas!" Empty names for many years, at
last they were filled with one clear concept, the concept of the
democratic experiment. "As I have walk'd in Alabama my morning
walk"--the living appeal to each state by name recalled Whitman's
generous amusing scope. "Far breath'd land! Arctic braced! Mexican
breez'd! The diverse! The compact! The Pennsylvanian! The Virginian! The
double Carolinian!" The orotund roll-call was not intended to evoke
Whitman. It was intended, as it happened, to evoke votes for Taft and
Sherman. But even these men were parts of the democratic experiment. And
the vastly peopled hall answered for Walt Whitman, as the empurpled
Penrose did not answer. It was they who were the leaves of our grass.
In Whitman, as William James has shown, there is an arrant mysticism
which his own Democratic Vistas exposed in cold light. Yet into this
credulity as to the virtue and possibilities of the people an alien is
likely to enter if his first intimacy with America came in the aliens'
creche. A settlement is a creche for the step-children of Europe, and it
is hard not to credit America at large with some of the impulses which
make the settlement. Such, at any rate, is the tendency I experienced
myself.
With this tendency, what of loyalty to the United States? I think of
Lincoln and his effected mysticism by Union, union for the experiment,
and I feel alive within me a complete identification with this land. The
keenest realization of the nation reached me, as I recall, the first
time I saw the capitol in Washington. Quite unsuspecting I strolled up
the hill from the station, just about midnight, the streets gleaming
after a warm shower. The plaza in front of the capitol was deserted. A
few high sentinel lamps threw a lonely light down the wet steps and
scantily illumined the pillars. Darkness veiled the dome. Standing apart
completely by myself, I felt as never before the union of which this
strength and simplicity was the symbol. The quietude of the night, the
scent of April pervading it, gave to the lonely building a dignity such
as I had seldom felt before. It seemed to me to stand for a fine and
achieved determination, for a purpose maintained, for a quiet faith in
the peoples and states that lay away behind it to far horizons. Lincoln,
I thought, had perhaps looked from those steps on such a night in April,
and felt the same promise of spring.