Whatever shortcomings I may have found during my fifty-year period of
Americanization; however America may have failed to help my transition
from a foreigner into an American, I owe to her the most priceless gift
that any nation can offer, and that is opportunity.
As the world stands to-day, no nation offers opportunity in the degree
that America does to the foreign-born. Russia may, in the future, as I
like to believe she will, prove a second United States of America in
this respect. She has the same limitless area; her people the same
potentialities. But, as things are to-day, the United States offers, as
does no other nation, a limitless opportunity: here a man can go as far
as his abilities will carry him. It may be that the foreign-born, as in
my own case, must hold on to some of the ideals and ideas of the land of
his birth; it may be that he must develop and mould his character by
overcoming the habits resulting from national shortcomings. But into the
best that the foreign-born can retain, America can graft such a wealth
of inspiration, so high a national idealism, so great an opportunity for
the highest endeavor, as to make him the fortunate man of the earth
to-day.
He can go where he will: no traditions hamper him; no limitations are
set except those within himself. The larger the area he chooses in which
to work, the larger the vision he demonstrates, the more eager the
people are to give support to his undertakings if they are convinced
that he has their best welfare as his goal. There is no public
confidence equal to that of the American public, once it is obtained. It
is fickle, of course, as are all publics, but fickle only toward the man
who cannot maintain an achieved success.
A man in America cannot complacently lean back upon victories won, as he
can in the older European countries, and depend upon the glamour of the
past to sustain him or the momentum of success to carry him. Probably
the most alert public in the world, it requires of its leaders that they
be alert. Its appetite for variety is insatiable, but its appreciation,
when given, is fullhanded and whole-hearted. The American public never
holds back from the man to whom it gives; it never bestows in a
niggardly way; it gives all or nothing.
What is not generally understood of the American people is their
wonderful idealism. Nothing so completely surprises the foreign-born as
the discovery of this trait in the American character. The impression is
current in European countries-perhaps less generally since the war--that
America is given over solely to a worship of the American dollar. While
between nations as between individuals, comparisons are valueless, it
may not be amiss to say, from personal knowledge, that the Dutch worship
the gulden infinitely more than do the Americans the dollar.
I do not claim that the American is always conscious of this idealism;
often he is not. But let a great convulsion touching moral questions
occur, and the result always shows how close to the surface is his
idealism. And the fact that so frequently he puts over it a thick veneer
of materialism does not affect its quality. The truest approach, the
only approach in fact, to the American character is, as Viscount Bryce
has so well said, through its idealism.
It is this quality which gives the truest inspiration to the
foreign-born in his endeavor to serve the people of his adopted country.
He is mentally sluggish, indeed, who does not discover that America will
make good with him if he makes good with her.
But he must play fair. It is essentially the straight game that the true
American plays, and he insists that you shall play it too. Evidence
there is, of course, to the contrary in American life, experiences that
seem to give ground for the belief that the man succeeds who is not
scrupulous in playing his cards. But never is this true in the long run.
Sooner or later--sometimes, unfortunately, later than sooner--the public
discovers the trickery. In no other country in the world is the moral
conception so clear and true as in America, and no people will give a
larger and more permanent reward to the man whose effort for that public
has its roots in honor and truth.
"The sky is the limit" to the foreign-born who comes to America endowed
with honest endeavor, ceaseless industry, and the ability to carry
through. In any honest endeavor, the way is wide open to the will to
succeed. Every path beckons, every vista invites, every talent is called
forth, and every efficient effort finds its due reward. In no land is
the way so clear and so free.
How good an American has the process of Americanization made me? That I
cannot say. Who can say that of himself? But when I look around me at
the American-born I have come to know as my close friends, I wonder
whether, after all, the foreign-born does not make in some sense a
better American--whether he is not able to get a truer perspective;
whether his is not the deeper desire to see America greater; whether he
is not less content to let its faulty institutions be as they are;
whether in seeing faults more clearly he does not make a more decided
effort to have America reach those ideals or those fundamentals of his
own land which he feels are in his nature, and the best of which he is
anxious to graft into the character of his adopted land?
It is naturally with a feeling of deep satisfaction that I remember two
Presidents of the United States considered me a sufficiently typical
American to wish to send me to my native land as the accredited minister
of my adopted country. And yet when I analyze the reasons for my choice
in both these instances, I derive a deeper satisfaction from the fact
that my strong desire to work in America for America led me to ask to be
permitted to remain here.
It is this strong impulse that my Americanization has made the driving
power of my life. And I ask no greater privilege than to be allowed to
live to see my potential America become actual: the America that I like
to think of as the America of Abraham Lincoln and of Theodore
Roosevelt--not faultless, but less faulty. It is a part in trying to
shape that America, and an opportunity to work in that America when it
comes, that I ask in return for what I owe to her. A greater privilege
no man could have.