Foreign Outposts in the United States
Four distinct national elements in the United States showed, in
lesser or greater part, disloyalty and pro-Germanism during the War.
These were the Germans, the Jewish Bolsheviki, the Sinn-Feiners, and
the French-Canadians. Of course these four were no different from
most other foreign-speaking elements. Only their standpoints and
loyalties were clearly brought out by the war--that was all. Italian or
Portuguese, Greek or Slav, in case their home country had been lined up
against the United States, would have acted in just the same way.
Here we must touch upon a fact which is pretty widely known or taken
for granted. There is a fundamental difference between this later
immigration and that of the middle portion of the nineteenth century.
The Germans, Hungarians, and Italians of 1848-70, for instance,
came to America for the same reason as most of the original British
and Irish. They were seeking freedom and democracy. Their purposes
were idealistic. They sought in the new country not only economic
opportunity but political liberty which were denied them in the old.
They were Americans at heart before they left their old home.
The new immigration is totally different. This later swarm has come
mostly to get jobs and money. Among them, no doubt, there are a few
who are gifted with qualities of mind and character which make this
description inapplicable. I am referring to the many, not the few.
In Southern and Eastern Europe they form the lowest grade of the
working class and include a large percentage of beggars and peddlers,
of thieves and criminals. The average immigrant of this sort has
been accustomed to a condition of poverty unknown to, and almost
unimaginable to, the average American. His physical standards of living
are such as to make his competition with the original American worker
unfair and deadly. Great masses of them have come without the slightest
intention of remaining with us and adopting American standards. Herded
together under the most unsanitary conditions, hoarding up their wages
with a greed incomprehensible to an American, crowds of them rush back
to the country of their origin as soon as their savings are sufficient
for their purposes. Meanwhile they are replaced by others until the
standards of living of the American-born wage-earners are hopelessly
undermined. Each immigrant who comes to us under these conditions
prevents the founding of an American home and the birth of American
children. Let us hasten to add that their coming and going can not in
any way be held as an accusation against themselves. Responsibility
lies entirely with us. Employers who bring them over, or prevent their
rejection, under the conditions stated, are guilty of a monstrous crime
against civilization. This crime is comparable to only one other in
our history--the African slave-trade of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries.
[Illustration: Where the Water Gushes From the Rock Klansmen Assemble
Each Year to Drink the Libation of Fellowship.]
Meanwhile every conception and institution upon which our social and
political life is established is torn from its mooring and broken up by
the force of the inpouring waves. In Southern and Eastern Europe and
in the Near East, these masses are, or have been, until very recently,
ruled as they were in the Middle Ages. Rebellion against tyrants to
them means acceptance of Anarchism or Bolshevism, or at least German
state Socialism. East of the Rhine and south of the Alps they are
capable at present only of running wildly about from one tyranny to
another, from one stupid blunder to another and back again. If this
population in Europe is proving itself to be totally incompetent
to govern itself, how can we expect it to take an intelligent and
useful part in all the complexities of democracy here? If a million
Hungarians, for instance, have failed at every point of the political
compass in Hungary, how, in Heaven's name, can we expect them to
succeed in New York or Chicago? That mass of Hungarians, like Italians
and Germans, like Jews and Greeks, induces the vilest sort of boss
rule. They are largely kept away from our public schools by clerical
opposition to our school system. A slave population in Europe, they
become a slave population here. Politically they are the willing tools
of every hidden and dangerous force at work in our public life.
It is no part of my purpose to arouse, in the slightest degree, hatred
of these people. Many of them are kind, innocent, simple, unknowing
creatures. As strangers in a strange land, they deserve every degree
of consideration, every means of help at our hands, which it is in our
power to give to them. Their natural inclination, as well as their
great numbers, are responsible for that separation from us which the
foreign quarter implies. The continued use of foreign languages, and
the clinging to foreign customs, are things which should never have
been tolerated on our soil. By herding together they bring up their
children in a foreign atmosphere, thus perpetuating and increasing the
weaknesses and dangers which they have brought into our national life.
I used the word "increasing" advisedly. In Europe each unit of this
backward and inept mass of poor is merged in a nation which understands
him and where he, in turn, somewhat understands his surroundings. But
segregated by language and nationality here, they are broken away from
their old moorings without binding themselves to the new. In the old
world they are led politically, sometimes, by men of education and
ideals. With us they fall easy prey to any fool and fakir and dishonest
representative of the political machine or vicious interest which may
seek to prey upon them and mislead them.
A few particular facts concerning propagandistic activities among our
immigrant population may be illuminating if set down together. During
the war the pro-Germans organized and conducted a most elaborate and
expensive propaganda among our Ukrainian immigrants. This was done in
order to weaken Russia at home, both before and after the revolution.
Sinn-Fein Irish, because of their inveterate hatred of the British,
were in many cases used to spread pro-German propaganda. This was
effectual both before and after we went into the war.
A very large percentage of the Russian Jews in New York City and
elsewhere were, at the beginning of the war, pro-German because
they were anti-Russian. After we entered the war they were bitterly
anti-American because they were pro-Bolshevist. No possible turn of
events could make them take a pro-American position upon any issue
under the sun. This is the element, by the way, which used funds from
Russia to carry on its pro-Bolshevistic propaganda among our Negroes.
In certain places, including New York City, it urged the Negroes to
arm themselves and fight the whites.
The French-Canadian immigrants among us number, with their children,
nearly half a million. During the war they were, strange as it may
seem, anti-French. The French-Canadian population is completely
dominated, politically, socially and intellectually, by their clergy.
These clericals still hate France and the French Government because the
French Revolution overthrew the power of the Roman Church in France.
They still belong to the ancient regime. So they naturally took the
side of the ancient regime, the German side. Among us, they were
largely passive. In Canada they actively opposed every war activity of
their government from start to finish of the war.
Of the Asiatics there are two main elements--the Japanese and the East
Indians. Of the East Indians there are not many, but their number is
steadily increasing. They are being widely used to stir up an Indian
revolution against the British Empire. Whether this is or is not
justified we are not discussing here. The point is that this foreign
element is using America as a vantage-point from which to make war upon
another country.
Finally, we come to the Japanese. Here we find the climax of this
whole matter. The religion of the Japanese immigrants is, primarily,
Mikado-worship. Sums of money to build the temples for this delectable
form of religious expression are furnished largely by the Japanese
government. When we ponder these facts we may well ask whether we as a
nation do not ourselves require a guardian. We resemble a five-year old
child with a purse full of money, sitting in a poker game with greedy
and astute gamblers. To carry our sentimentalism so far, to overwork
the theory of the brotherhood of man to such an extent as this, is
to court total disaster. We as a nation are asleep because selfish,
corrupt and designing interests among us have drugged us out of our
senses. These great interests want cheap labor. They are aided in their
designs by a crowd of well-meaning but ignorant sentimentalists, most
of whom do not dream that they are helping to destroy our American
nation in order to experience an emotional satisfaction. The employers
get their cheap labor, and the sentimentalists their self-satisfaction.
We, the foolish majority, are losing our freedom and our country. If
the facts do not cry us into action, why multiply words? All America
is hoping, praying and preparing for peace with Japan. But to further
permit even the smallest amount of Japanese immigration will surely
tend to war. In the event of war any American in Japan will undoubtedly
take the side of his own country. We shall fully expect him to do so.
For the same reason the hundred and fifty thousand Japanese in our
own country will prove to be a hundred and fifty thousand skillful
and resolute enemies. Making an American out of a Japanese under the
conditions above described is as impossible as making a sheep out of
a goat, or a dog out of a cat. As to whether or not we are superior
to the Japanese, is not the matter at issue here. The important fact
right here is that we differ greatly from each other in the basic
things of life, and these differences are largely inherited qualities.
Furthermore, these differences must surely make Japanese amalgamation
with our people wholly undesirable. Such a mixture of bloods runs
counter to a fundamental principle of biology which all high-school
children learn as a matter of course. The offspring of such a blending
of widely different stocks are likely to be unstable in mind. In
general they can not qualify as to either the physical, mental or moral
standards of either race. In amalgamation there is likely to be a loss
from the standards of either side.
The Japanese child in the United States is sent to a school owned and
controlled by the Japanese Government. There he is taught the language,
ideals and duty of an abject subject of the Mikado. Finally, the
Japanese birth rate in California is sixty-nine per thousand annually,
the white birth rate nineteen per thousand.
"But the pure descendants of the Japanese immigrants may surely change
and become real Americans," I hear somebody saying. Meanwhile, we
have just been informed that the son of German parents in Cincinnati,
who had accepted a Captain-Surgeon's commission in our army and gone
to France had not been perfectly Americanized. The fellow was hanged
for inoculating our soldiers with disease germs instead of typhoid
serum. This creature was born and reared not in the United States, but
in the German section of Cincinnati. With this in mind we expect to
Americanize the Japanese, the very breath of whose intense religious
emotion is the sacred worship of their absolute and august ruler, the
Mikado!
Be it a million Russians or a million Japanese, a million Italians or
a million French-Canadians--either their importation or their birth
upon our soil prevents by the stifling force of economic competition
the birth of a million Americans. In the name of Almighty God and our
country, what has become of our brains? These facts are enough to make
any of us not totally bereft of his senses to go into the highways and
the byways crying for the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, or if some man
has a better plan for safeguarding the nation conjuring him in God's
name to proclaim it.