[Footnote 3: Address at the Americanization Banquet, Washington, D. C., May
14, 1919. Reprinted by permission from _Proceedings of the Americanization
Conference_, Government Printing Office, 1919.]
You have been in conference for the past three days, and I have greatly
regretted that I could not be with you. You have been gathered together as
crusaders in a great cause. You are the missionaries in a new movement. You
represent millions of people in the United States who to-night believe that
there is no other question of such importance before the American people as
the solidifying and strengthening of true American sentiment.
I understand that your conference has been a success; and it has been a
success because, unlike some other conferences, it was made up of experts
who knew what they were talking about. But you know no one can give the
final answer upon the question of Americanization. You may study methods,
but you find yourselves foiled because there is no one method--no
standardized method that can always be used to deal correctly and truly
with any human problem. Bergson, the French philosopher, was here a year or
two ago, and he made a suggestion to me that seemed very profound when he
said that the theory of evolution could carry on as to species until it
came to deal with man, and then you had to deal with each individual man
upon the theory that he was a species by himself. And I think there is more
than superficial significance to that. It may go to the very heart and
center of what we call spirituality. It may be because of that very fact
the individual is a soul by himself; and it is for that reason that there
must be avenues opened into men's hearts that can not be standardized.
Man is a great moated, walled castle, with doors by the dozens, doors by
the score, leading into him--but most of us keep our doors closed. It is
difficult for people to gain access to us; but there are some doors that
are open to the generality of mankind; and as those who are seeking to know
our fellow man and to reach him, it is our place to find what those doors
are and how those doors can be opened.
One of those doors might be labeled "our love for our children." That is a
door common to all. Another door might be labeled "our love for a piece of
land." Another door might be labeled "our common hatred of injustice."
Another door might be labeled "the need for human sympathy." Another door
might be labeled "fear of suffering." And another door might be labeled
"the hope that we all have in our hearts that this world will turn into a
better one."
Through some one of those doors every man can be reached; at least, if not
every man, certainly the great mass of mankind. They are not to be reached
through interest alone; they are not to be reached through mind; they are
reached through instincts and impulses and through tendencies; and there is
some word, some act that you or I can do or say that will get inside of
that strange, strange man and reveal him to himself and reveal him to us
and make him of use to the world.
We want to reach, through one of those doors, every man in the United
States who does not sympathize with us in a supreme allegiance to our
country. You would be amused to see some of the letters that come to me,
asking almost peremptorily what methods should be adopted by which men and
women can be Americanized, as if there were some one particular
prescription that could be given; as if you could roll up the sleeve of a
man and give him a hypodermic of some solution that would, by some strange
alchemy, transform him into a good American citizen; as if you could take
him water, and in it make a mixture--one part the ability to read and write
and speak the English language; then another part, the Declaration of
Independence; one part, the Constitution of the United States; one part, a
love for apple pie; one part, a desire and a willingness to wear American
shoes; and another part, a pride in using American plumbing; and take all
those together and grind them up, and have a solution which you could put
into a man's veins and by those superficialities, transform him into a man
who loves America. No such thing can be done. We know it can not be done,
because we know those who read and write and speak the language and they do
not have that feeling. We know that we regard one who takes his glass of
milk and his apple pie for lunch as presumably a good American. We know
that there is virtue in the American bath. We know that there are
principles enunciated in the Declaration of Independence and in the
Constitution of the United States which are necessary to get into one's
system before he can thoroughly understand the United States; and there are
some who have those principles as a standard for their lives, who yet have
never heard of the Declaration of Independence or of the Constitution of
the United States. You can not make Americans that way. You have got to
make them by calling upon the fine things that are within them, and by
dealing with them in sympathy; by appreciating what they have to offer us,
and by revealing to them what we have to offer them. And that brings to
mind the thought that this work must be a human work--must be something
done out of the human heart and speaking to the human heart, and must
largely turn upon instrumentalities that are in no way formal, and that
have no dogma and have no creed, and which can not be put into writing, and
can not be set upon the press--to a thought that I have had in my mind for
some time as to the advancing of a new organization in this country--and,
perhaps, you will sympathize with it--I have called it, for lack of a
better name, "The League of American Fellowship," and there should be no
condition for membership, excepting a pledge that each one gives that each
year, or for one year, the member will undertake to interpret America
sympathetically to at least one foreign-born person, or one person in the
United States who does not have an understanding of American institutions,
American traditions, American history, American sports, American life, and
the spirit that is American. If you, upon your return to your homes, could
organize in the cities that you represent, throughout the breadth of this
land, some such league as that, and by individual effort, and without
formalism, pledge the body of those with whom you come in contact to make
Americans by sympathy and by understanding, I believe we would make great
progress in the solution of this problem.
I do not know what method can be adopted for the making of Americans, but I
think there can be a standard test as to the result. We can tell when a man
is American in his spirit. There has been a test through which the men of
this country--and the women, too--have recently passed--supposed to be the
greatest of all tests--the test of war. When men go forth and sacrifice
their lives, then we say they believe in something as beyond anything else;
and so our men in this country, boys of foreign birth, boys of foreign
parentage, Greek and Dane and Italian and Russian and Polander and
Frenchman and Portuguese, Irish, Scotch--all these boys have gone to
France, fought their fight, given up their lives, and they have proved, all
Americans that they are, that there is a power in America by which this
strange conglomeration of peoples can be melted into one, and by which a
common attachment can be made and a common sympathy developed. I do not
know how it is done, but it is done.
I remember once, thirty years or more ago, passing through North Dakota on
a Northern Pacific train. I stepped off the platform, and the thermometer
was thirty or forty degrees below zero. There was no one to be seen,
excepting one man, and that man, as he stood before me, had five different
coats on him to keep him warm; and I looked out over that sea of snow, and
then I said, "Well, this is a pretty rough country, isn't it?" He was a
Dane, I think, and he looked me hard in the eye and he said, "Young fellow,
I want you to understand that this is God's own country."
Every one of those boys who returned from France came back feeling that
this is God's own country. He knows little of America as a whole, perhaps;
he can not recite any provisions in the Constitution of the United States;
it may be that he has learned his English while in the Army; but some part
of this country is "God's own country" to him. And it is a good thing that
we should not lose the local attachments that we have--those narrownesses,
those prejudices that give point to character. There is a kind of breadth
that is shallowness; there is a kind of sympathy that has no punch. We must
remember that if that world across the water is to be made what it can be
under democratic forms, it is to be led by Democracy; and, therefore, the
supreme responsibility falls upon us to make this all that a Democracy can
be. And if there is a bit of local pride attaching to one part of our soil,
that gives emphasis to our intense attachment to this country, let it be. I
would not remove it. I come from a part of this country that is supposed to
be more prejudiced in favor of itself than any other section. I remember
years ago hearing that the Commissioner of Fisheries wished to propagate
and spread in these Atlantic waters the western crab--which is about four
times the size of the Atlantic crab--and so they sent two carloads of those
crabs to the Atlantic coast. They were dumped into the Atlantic at Woods
Hole, and on each crab was a little aluminum tablet saying "When found
notify Fish Commission, Washington." A year passed and no crab was found;
two years passed and no crab was found. And the third year two of those
crabs were found by a Buenos Aires fisherman, who reported that they
evidently were going south, bound around the Cape, returning to California.
A week or two ago I was addressing a Methodist conference in Baltimore, and
I told this story to a dear old gray-headed man, seated opposite me, who
was eighty-six years of age, who said he had been preaching there for sixty
years; and I said to him, "Do you come from Maryland?" He said, "Yes, sir."
He said, "I come from the Eastern Shore. Have you ever been there?" I said,
"No; I am sorry that I have never been on the Eastern Shore." He said,
"Never been there? Well, I am sorry for you." He said, "You know, we are a
strange people down there--a strange people." He said, "We have some
peculiar legends; some stories that have come down to us, generation after
generation; and while other people may not believe them, we do; and one of
the stories is that when Adam and Eve were in the Garden of Eden, they fell
sick, and the Lord was greatly concerned about them, and he called a
meeting of his principal angels and consulted with them as to what to do
for them by way of giving them a change of air and improving their health;
and the Angel Gabriel said, 'Why not take them down to the Eastern Shore?'
And the Lord said, 'Oh, no; that would not be sufficient change.'"
And so, as you go throughout the United States, you find men attached to
different parts of our continent, making their homes in different places,
and not thinking often about the great country to which they belong,
excepting as it is represented by that flag; and every one of those local
attachments is a valuable asset to our country, and nothing should be done
to minimize them. When the boys come back from France, every one of them
says, "The thing I most desired while I was in France was to get home, for
there I first realized how splendid and beautiful and generous and rich a
country America was." We want to make these men who come to us from abroad
realize what those boys realized, and we want to put inside of their
spirits an appreciation of those things that are noble and fine in American
law and American institutions and American life; and we want them to join
with us as citizens in giving to America every good thing that comes out of
every foreign country.
We are a blend in sympathies and a blend in art, a blend in literature, a
blend in tendencies, and that is our hope for making this the supremely
great race of the world. It is not to be done mechanically; it is not to be
done scientifically; it is to be done by the human touch; by reaching some
door into that strange man, with some word or some act that will show to
him that there is in America the kind of sentiment and sympathy that that
man's soul is reaching out for.
This _is_ God's own country. We want the boys to know that the sky is blue
and big and broad with hope, and that its fields are green with promise,
and that in every one of our hearts there is the desire that the land shall
be better than it is--while we have no apologies to make for what it is.
This is no land in which to spread any doctrine of revolution, because we
have abolished revolution. When we came here we gave over the right of
revolution. You can not have revolution in a land unless you have somebody
to revolt against--and whom would you revolt against in the United States?
And when we won our revolution 140 years ago, we then said, "We give over
that inherent right of revolution because there can be no such thing as
revolution against a country in which the people govern."
We have no particular social theory to advocate in Americanization; no
economic system to advocate; but we can fairly and squarely demand of every
man in the United States, if he is a citizen, that he shall give supreme
allegiance to the flag of the United States, and swear by it--and he is not
worthy to be its citizen unless it holds first place in his heart.
The best test of whether we are Americans or not will not come, nor has it
come, with war. It will come when we go hand in hand together, recognizing
that there are defects in our land, that there are things lacking in our
system; that our programs are not perfect; that our institutions can be
bettered; and we look forward constantly by coöperation to making this a
land in which there will be a minimum of fear and a maximum of hope.