To what? To an America alive, an America that was no longer a despised
cultural foster child of Europe, with unpleasant questions always being
asked about its parentage, to an America that had begun to be conscious
of itself as a living home-making folk, to an America that had at last
given up the notion that anything worth while could ever be got by
being in a hurry, by being dollar rich, by being merely big and able to
lick some smaller nation with one hand tied behind its broad national
back.
As for the men of Jewish blood, so many of whom I found quick and eager
to meet me half way, my heart went out to them in gratitude. They were
wanting love and understanding, had in their natures many impulses
that were destructive. Was there a sense of being outlaws? They did
not want their own secret sense of separateness from the life about
them commented upon but it existed. They themselves kept it alive and I
thought they were not unwise in doing so. I watched them eagerly. Did
they have, in their very race feeling, the bit of ground under their
feet it was so hard for an Ohio man to get in Cleveland Cincinnati or
Chicago or New York? The man of Jewish blood, in an American city,
could at any rate feel no more separateness from the life about him
than the advertising writer in a Chicago advertising agency who had
within him a love of the craft of words. The Jewish race had made
itself felt in the arts for ages and even our later middle-western
anti-Jewish crusader Henry Ford had no doubt as a child been taught to
read the Bible written by old Jewish word-fellows.
As far as I myself could understand, the feeling of separateness
from the life about was common to all Americans. It explained the
everlasting get-together movements always going on among business men
and as for race prejudices, they also were common. There was the South
with its concern about the Negroes, the Far West and its orientals, the
whole country a little later with its sudden hatred of the Germans and
in the Middle West all sorts of little cross-currents of race hatreds
as the factory hands came into the towns from all over Europe. No
American ever met another American without drawing a little back. There
was a question in the soul. “What are your people? Where did they come
from?” “What kind of blood flows in your veins?”
Could it not very well be that the men of Jewish blood who had given
themselves to the crafts in America could look at life a bit more
impersonally, go out more quickly and warmly to individuals, throw up
out of the body of the race more individuals who could give themselves
wholeheartedly to the cultural life because of the very fact of a race
history behind them?
One had always to remember that we Americans were in the process of
trying to make a race. The Jews had been a part of the life of almost
every race that had come to us and were for perhaps that very reason in
a better position than the rest of us to help make our own race.