Our Cities a Menace to Democracy
Referring again to the menace of the American city to American
institutions, I desire to remind the reader of the thought of some
of our most profound thinkers on the great problems of democracy.
Some of these views expressed at different periods of our history
were prophetic, and some of them were conclusions, as though the
visions of the seers were being fulfilled. In the early days of the
republic when there were no great cities in our country and when the
tide of immigration had just begun to flow to our shores and settle
in the growing centers along the Atlantic seaboard, Mr. Jefferson
said, "The American city is a cancer on the body politic." He seemed
to foresee, at the very beginning of the republic, the deadly poison
of anti-democracy generated among the alien people congested in our
cities. In 1866 Wendell Phillips, a powerful advocate of emancipation,
said, after the great conflict was ended and the Negroes free, "The
time is coming when the American city will strain the government
as slavery never did." He, too, foresaw the virus which the city
would spread to the entire nation, attacking and consuming the great
principles of democracy upon which the republic was founded. In recent
years, Lord Bryce, Ambassador of Great Britain to the United States,
after years of study and careful investigation, wrote that classic
entitled "The American Commonwealth." In this work there was much
commendation of American institutions, but the book was not without
candid criticism. He said that "the conspicuous failure of American
democracy is in its great cities." The clear meaning of the eminent
Englishman was that the American people remained really democratic
only in the rural sections and the villages. Already conglomerate
population from every clime and shore had destroyed democracy in our
congested centers. Only recently Mr. H.G. Wells, one of the most
conspicuous, progressive thinkers in the world, looked upon New
York with its seething millions, heard its Babel of languages, felt
its delirious fever, and then calmly announced that Petrograd in its
rust and desolation was a picture of New York in the future. In our
greatest city, this profound student of social and political life saw
unmistakable evidence of the real and seething madness of Bolshevism
which meant the overthrow and the utter collapse of all things
democratic.
We are told to-day (1920) that millions of workers in our great cities
are unemployed. I reflect at once upon the figures which are placed
before us. In round numbers we have, this winter, about six millions of
unnaturalized foreign working people living in our cities, and almost
exactly the same number of employed on our hands. What would they have
us do? Are six millions more to come to us and thus give us a total of
twelve millions of unemployed? What would these people all do for a
living? There are simply not enough jobs in the cities for them, and
it seems evident that there will not be in our generation. It is these
masses, which, by sheer force of number, gave us the present insoluble
problem of the city. Our cities can maintain their large populations
only if the country population is increased to supply them food and raw
materials on the one hand, and with markets on the other.
Overgrown cities are in themselves a menace. When the surplus is
composed of unassimilated and unemployed aliens the menace is
doubled,--nay, it is multiplied tenfold. The great city as at present
constructed and conducted corrodes the very soul of our American
life. Factory work, with every new invention of automatic machinery,
progressively selects those who are more and more unfit to be
Americans. A factory manager in Chicago recently amended a new rule for
the selection of employees. He would hire no blondes. The big blonde
people, he said, "would not stay at their machines until the whistle
blew." He was evidently hunting for a people who could be trained
never to move a foot, or an eye, for ten hours a day. The growth of
an American is ordinarily impossible under the conditions of either
great wealth or great poverty. The city simply can not furnish the
character-building elements which must needs go into the making of an
American. Every American child should be born to a vast heritage. This
heritage should include a fine healthy parentage, clean birth, gentle
care, proper nourishment and opportunity for play and education in the
open country.
Is there no cause for the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan among the robust,
native-born folk of the countryside? Is not the menace of the city to
our ideals and institutions an urgent demand for the organization of
our unspoiled rural life to save the nation from infection by the great
cities?
It may be that we are too late in starting this movement of "America
for Americans and Americans for America." No doubt it should have been
begun thirty years ago. But if we can find some method by which, after
ten years of entire rejection, immigration can be narrowly and rigidly
restricted, and by which the surplus population can be distributed
over the vast, uncultivated area of our great country, and slowly
wrought into our social life, there is yet a hope left for our country.
But if alien populations are permitted, as in the past, to flood our
land, colonize in our great cities, and propagate their kind with such
amazing rapidity, while only native-born Americans continue to till
the soil and propagate their kind in an appallingly decreasing ratio,
then our country is lost and everything the fathers strove to build for
posterity will sooner or later be wiped out. We do not in the least
seek to hide the fact that the Ku Klux Klan is making a last stand for
America as the home of Americans and Americanism.