Straight America, a call to national service
Date: 2022-11-23T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: United States -- Defenses; National service -- United States

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Title: Straight America, a call to national service

Author: Frances Kellor

Release date: November 23, 2022 [eBook #69409]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: The MacMillan Company

Credits: Charlene Taylor and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)

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OUR NATIONAL PROBLEMS

STRAIGHT AMERICA

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
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ATLANTA· SAN FRANCISCO

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited
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THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.
TORONTO

STRAIGHT AMERICA

A CALL TO NATIONAL SERVICE

BY
FRANCES A. KELLOR

New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1916

All rights reserved

Copyright, 1916,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up and electrotyped. Published June, 1916.

Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing Co.—Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

TO
THE PRESIDENT-ELECT OF 1916

CONTENTS

CHAPTER | | PAGE
I. | What is the Matter with America? | 1
II. | Americanism | 21
III. | The Native American | 43
IV. | America-made Citizens | 91
V. | The Popular Vote | 127
VI. | National Unity | 153

STRAIGHT AMERICA

CHAPTER I
What is the Matter with America?

For the first time in its history, America, broadly speaking, is consciously ashamed. However divided we may be upon preparedness, neutrality in thought has not brought peace of mind. We find ourselves making explanations and apologies. In the midst of unprecedented prosperity, we are restless and dissatisfied. Smoldering in the hearts of men is desire for change, fermenting in their minds is a demand for national leadership. The situation defies accurate analysis. It is not that we want war or that we favor militarism. Rather it is that our powers are dormant, our aspirations unexpressed, our beliefs unformulated, our attitude misrepresented, our motives misunderstood, and our presence in the world’s conflict unnoted.

We sit supinely under insult, injury, and violation of rights and laws, expressing such resentment and reaction as we have by sending relief funds and relief ships abroad, by making loans and munitions, by newspaper editorials, and by public speeches. We give vent to our feelings in a campaign for preparedness that urges Congress to pass a few feeble, disconnected defense bills, that organizes numerous defense organizations that are frantically busy collecting members and fees and holding meetings. We urge taking what we can get rather than insisting upon what we need. The result is, a large part of our energy goes into talk, which is not helping us greatly to really focus as a nation in this great crisis in the world’s history.

What really hurts us most is the realization that we, who think of America as the most prosperous, energetic, efficient, inventive, and best organized nation in the world, have suddenly discovered that we are nationally the most unprepared for united service in any field—geographical, military, industrial, economic, social, or educational. In vision, independent thinking, and citizenship we are not more prepared. In fact we have hardly yet begun to think of these in terms of national service.

We are still stunned by the realization that we are not in a position to grapple intelligently, instantly, and decisively with situations in our own country. Trinidad and Mexico have driven this lesson home. Our national method of dealing with hyphenism and its activities indicates little comprehension of its real roots. We now know also that we are not in a position to participate disinterestedly and courageously in the international adjustments that will take place at the close of the war. We suspect that the “peace ship” illustrated American capacity. Its founder’s victory in the presidential primary exposes our capacity for caprice in a nation’s crisis. We talk about fighting humanity’s battles when we have done none of the things that qualify us for such championship. We but dimly realize that a united, not a divided, nation must enter the lists. We talk about upholding the President’s hands, but we now know that we did in truth elect a minority President in 1912, and it is no great task to promise to uphold him. It is lip service to which we have long been accustomed.

The war has revealed to us the biting truth that we have one body of people on the coast line realizing the need of protection and another in the interior feeling quite safe at this distance. We see a conglomeration of colonies and ghettos and immigrant sections in our large cities, and the country dotted with settlements quite as un-American as anything to be found abroad. We face the fact that America is not first in the hearts of every resident, that not every man works for America, and that not every man trusts her present or believes in her future. This is still the land of promise for the “bird of passage” who exploits us, and whom we pluck in return.

Thanks to the war, we have been freed from the delusion that we are a united nation marching steadily along an American highway of peace, prosperity, common ideals, beliefs, language, and purpose. Security and prosperity have blinded us to the fact that we do not all speak the same language nor follow the same flag. We have marveled at the revelation that our own native-born sons and daughters of foreign-born parents could justify the Lusitania and defend the invasion of Belgium, and we have let it go at that, not realizing what the acceptance of this portends for future America. America has neglected, even forgotten, its task of making Americans of the people that have come to its shores. Men may be workmen and voters and taxpayers and bosses, but the final question for this nation to answer is—are they loyal American citizens?

In our quest for nationalism, we stand aghast at the task before us. About one seventh of our population is foreign born, and about one third is of foreign-born or mixed parentage. It is no small assimilative task to preserve the best in the traditions, beliefs, standards, and points of view of these peoples for the strengthening of America, and to give them enough of America’s ideals to make them strong citizens of a democratic country. Mr. Carl Snyder is authority for the statement that one half of all the aliens that have come to America are still alive. Despite the volumes written on the subject, we do not yet know whether this is a good or bad thing for America. The test has not yet been applied. The war is giving us a breathing spell to find out and to define a policy which will insure Americanism. In the absence of any constructive policy or clear national purpose we can predict little for the future. This we do know, that every government but our own has a national purpose which it is carrying out in America with its own subjects—naturalized or alien—through its representatives and agents, its publications, institutions, and business interests. America alone in its own territory has a negative procedure and is without a policy. We are concerned chiefly with those we can keep out or send back. Once an alien is admitted there is no system of protection, distribution, and assimilation; no specific inducements to citizenship; no encouragement to acquire a home stake in America. Sectional and specific interests compete for what the immigrant has to offer; the parent government keeps an eye on the new arrival and helps him in distress. The Federal government alone remains silent and indifferent.

It is true we have the beginning of such a system in several departments. It is encouraging that the Bureau of Naturalization has changed its attitude and is now being of some service to aliens who have applied for citizenship. For the many years of its existence, prior to 1915, this Bureau had not in any way encouraged or urged educational assistance for the prospective citizen. There is in the Bureau of Education a Division of Immigrant Education which for the past two years has been carrying on important educational work among immigrants. The educational work of these bureaus does not receive adequate support or authority and has not so far been considered as an essential part of real preparedness. The vision and faith and effort of these officials is not part of any strong defined policy; it is not coördinated with the government’s larger activities and could be wiped out to-morrow by a single order. It is makeshift, not policy.

This country is alive to the inadequacy of its army and navy. It has a glimmering that even the strengthening of these may not entirely protect its interests. If we may judge from the record of Congress and the press reports of the activities of our citizens to date, there appears, however, to be but the smallest comprehension of the slack that must be taken up throughout this nation; of the discipline, self-sacrifice, and spirit of service that each one of us must acquire; and of the need of organization along national lines that American institutions will require to be prepared to even maintain peace.

After many months of the European war, official America still finds its chief slogan to be “Safety first” and “Made in America.” Toward nationalizing its transportation lines, toward bringing all ports under Federal control, toward national citizenship training, toward educational unification and industrial preparedness the nation has made little progress. We are still dealing with ships and guns and ammunition, taking little thought of the questions of unity which will make a nation effective behind these defenses. We still quibble over whether we are for universal training or uniform service. We cannot federalize the militia or abandon useless army posts because it will offend some sectional interest that controls votes in the next election. This narrow conception of preparedness is the despair of thinking America. It is the doom of national unity.

In considering the hyphenated American, it is not so much that we question his ultimate loyalty. It is that we question his understanding and ability to act in an intelligent, organized way on behalf of America. It is that we do not know what influences may control his action though his heart and interest may be with America. The question for America to answer is whether we can create a united nation in both spirit and efficiency in the short time remaining before we have to deal with new questions arising after the war. We face the humiliating truth that for any immediate conflict this cannot be done, that we must take the risk and, if need be, weld our many peoples together on the firing line. Will the American desert his forum for the training camp; and the platform for inconspicuous field action? Will he erase his name from committees and memorials and petitions and throw away the press notices with his name in them for the toil and sweat of industrial mobilizing? Will the American woman stop making bandages and joining organizations and put the immigrant family on her calling list and send the illiterate adult to school and help to make English the common language of America? Can the Federal administration abandon its involved correspondence and political fences long enough to consider what the real preparedness of any nation comprises? A body of the best railway men in the country was asked some months ago to assist the government in railway preparedness and is still awaiting instructions. The Naval Consulting Board, representing the best brains in the country yet called together for industrial preparedness, pays its own bills, largely because of our national lack of vision and the “Pork barrel” methods of Congress.

In the growing demand for a more united America it is apparent that America needs a national spirit which shall combine reverence and service; a national consciousness which shall be willing to give as well as to receive benefits and to put something into politics as well as take something out; an ideal, which shall make every resident give something of his interest, service, time, and money voluntarily to America without waiting for conscription and without quibbling over “rights,” “emergencies,” “time of need,” or “obligations of business.”

The practical questions before America are how to become Americanized and how to stay Americanized. The answer to the first question comprehends all measures of preparedness adapted to our present needs. The answer to the second question comprehends America’s policy after the war.

In the measure in which we answer the first question so shall we answer the second. Let no one suppose that anything short of a national policy, purpose, and consciousness in which each one of us does his full share, will meet the critical need of the hour. We are agreed in the hope that America shall endure as a great nation; that we wish to preserve our free institutions and constitutional guarantees. We are also generally agreed that America shall rank in the world as a nation of vision, courage, ideals, opportunity, and achievement; and that, last of all, out of this democracy we hope to get the greatest amount of aspiration, happiness, and achievement per man that it is possible for a strong nation to have.

These are not to be achieved by inaction or by misdirected action. We are at the point where every act counts for or against the future of America. I believe our capacity for nationalism is in exact proportion to the measures we take for its achievement. The war has taught us that it cannot be left to the complacency of the native American or to the voluntary efforts of the immigrant. A general melting pot tended by no one in particular does not necessarily brew a nation. This is even more true when we find so many other self-interested nations and people stirring this pot. The war has also taught us that the demand for cheap labor cannot continue to be the chief determining factor in the admission of immigrants—because of America’s new interest in aliens as prospective citizens.

We not only have a present nation-size job of assimilation, but we need to prepare ourselves for the problems that will accompany negotiations for peace. We shall have at least three questions of great and far-reaching importance—incoming immigration, outgoing emigration, and citizenship status in America and abroad.

If the pending immigration bill represents the sum total of the wisdom we can summon on the first subject, we shall fail miserably to improve this opportunity by substituting a constructive policy for our prevailing negative policy. Such arbitrary tests as the literacy clause based on race and class theories and antagonisms bear no real or lasting relation to the fundamental national needs of the country. This country needs a statesmanlike policy in its international relations based not upon theoretical makeshifts, but upon a knowledge of existing conditions, upon capacity for assimilating the immigrant, and upon our power to develop the machinery which will make assimilation possible.

Admission of aliens to this country should be based upon their capacity for Americanization. Any exclusion laws should look to the raising of the physical standard, owing to the results of the privations and hardships of war, with greater emphasis on deportation for crime. I believe that every incoming immigrant should declare upon arrival his or her intention to remain here and become a citizen. Every immigrant should be required to become literate in the English language (the minimum standard to be definitely set) within five years after arrival, provided facilities are offered him. Deportation should be the penalty for failure to do so. With the probable increase in the immigration of women and children, every safeguard should be thrown about their admission, arrival, and distribution.

A policy of distribution should be worked out. This again requires three fundamental lines of activity—agricultural organization which will enable the land to compete with industry for the laborer and settler; the development of a rural credit system which will enable people to go to the land; and a national system of government employment agencies and the regulation of all private agencies doing an interstate business. All of the civic and stimulated “back to the land” schemes are doomed to failure until these three questions are solved. Industry will get the great mass of the immigrants as long as it offers higher wages, steadier employment, decent conditions and opportunities for advancement; and so long as, unlike agriculture, it has the organization to reach the aliens on or before arrival.

A policy of national education is required for a statesmanlike consideration of nationalism. Local communities cannot carry the burden of educating large numbers of incoming residents concerning whom they have not been forewarned and who have not grown up in an American community. The relation of education to seasonal labor is important. The great forces in Americanization are the home, the school, and the neighborhood. These cannot influence the itinerant resident, in one town to-day and gone to-morrow; in a factory this month and in a wheat field next month; in a city with its rule of civilization one year, and in a labor camp with only the most primitive rule another year; in a well-ordered home one week and in a derailed freight car the next. We must contrive that educational and cultural forces shall follow the man from place to place if we are to achieve nationalism through assimilation.

America has never had any method of protecting newly arrived aliens. This has been left to states, cities, philanthropies, racial societies, or to foreign governments. The alien is not only an international figure until he becomes a citizen, with all of the entanglements of dual citizenship and obligations abroad, but he is an inter-state and inter-city figure. Our industrial system and living conditions make him so. The average immigrant travels more in the few months after arrival in America than during his whole lifetime abroad. In the face of this, two cities and three states have recognized his disability and handicaps and have tried specifically to protect him. When the Federal government substituted Ellis Island for Castle Garden, all the safeguards that were thrown about the immigrant by law in the early fifties were abolished because there was no longer anybody to enforce them. We shall never attain a united America so long as we permit the first educational and social contacts of the immigrant to be controlled by his self-interested countrymen, and our equally self-interested Americans, and the exploiter, acting independently, or as the tool of both.

I am unable to find in government or in industrial organization, or in a combination of the two, any such marshaling of facts, any such attention to vital details, any such breadth of view as to make one sanguine of results. The industrial inventory now being made by the Committee on Industrial Preparedness of the Naval Consulting Board is indeed an indication of the possibilities. It is too early to say whether the government will use it or bury the results along with other naval reports.

This is the kind of service in which all good Americans can join, for the guns have been taken out of industrial preparedness. It is not the kind of task prosperous Americans looking for appreciation will like. It is singularly devoid of the pleasures of the footlight and applause; it cannot be done by a committee meeting or sending a check; it is not to be accomplished by “interest” or spasmodic work. It means a full day’s work in the regular task at which each man earns a living, to which is added the overhead charge of Americanism and nationalism. I am convinced that no other service or method will make America again unashamed.

We may fairly conclude that the real matter with America is that as a nation it has not achieved within itself a permanent national consciousness. It has no clear conception of its national power or its responsibility, having conformed too largely to the wishes of local governments and their representatives. The Congressman still represents, not America, but his district. This is illustrated by the retention of useless army posts and state militia doing police duty. The prevailing conditions in our political world have failed to make the Federal government master of its own resources and forces and the director of its own destinies. We are still propagandists occupying the field of debate on matters of preparedness. We are relying on the presidential campaign—the heat of battle, as usual—to tell us where “we are at,” after nearly two years of world conflict.

America’s selfish preoccupation, its own growth and prosperity, have commercialized national sensibility. Our war-order prices show this. Citizenship has come to be the cheapest of its privileges and the football of politics. The country has been living unto itself while taking into its heart the outpouring of other nations. The American dollar has been the goal of success, and “Safety first” the national motto.

Whether, in the absence of a great dramatic crisis, we shall attain that heroic spirit by which a nation is finally welded together remains to be seen. America needs nationalized vision and action. America needs universal service from each and every citizen. America needs to get together, to study itself, to have records of its needs and action, to organize, to plan, to standardize its efforts. America needs national incentives and national rewards outside of politics. America needs leaders who see its future in terms of international duties, Americanism, and efficiency—a synonym for preparedness.

Will America achieve these things? I believe the next few years will indicate whether America shall endure as a great nation or become a colony of states and sectional interests. The responsibility rests squarely upon the shoulders of each and every one of us. We cannot delegate it to Congress or legislatures, to benevolence or charity, to managers or superintendents, to the “man who has time” or to the agitator. The call is to national service for every one of us, and the only answer should be, where can we serve best and how soon shall we begin?

CHAPTER II
Americanism

What is Americanism?

On the day this was written there appeared in the daily press a “pledge” now being circulated among young men, especially in our colleges and universities:

“I being over 18 years of age hereby pledge myself against enlistment as a volunteer for any military or naval service in international warfare, offensive or defensive, and against giving my approval to such enlistment on the part of others.”

Compare with this pledge that solemn oath taken many years ago by the wise elders of a new republic:

“... in support of these truths we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.”

Which strikes the keynote to the future of America?

“We cannot in this country hope for the compelling devotion which has animated Germany, still less for the supreme moral and intellectual force which is the staying power of France,” says Miss Repplier in a recent statement.

What then can we hope for? Granted our geographical difficulties, granted our youth, our size, and the consequent imperfect control of our material resources, granted the complexity of our problem caused by the rapid immigration of the past years, granted that we are still a body of states—does this mean that we cannot acquire the spirit of France and the efficiency of Germany?

I believe Miss Repplier’s attitude (a typical native American one) shows an entirely mistaken conception of the situation. No nation ever had a more vigorous birth than ours. This country was founded upon a body of conviction, clarified by a white heat of passion, but representing the judgment of deliberate men and great statesmen, men who saw into the future, and built the ship of state by that vision.

I believe the foundation stones of Americanism are exactly what they were 140 years ago,—liberty, opportunity, and obligation. We have lost sight of the third. The conception of liberty upon which this country was founded was a chastened and a disciplined conception. It was chastened by a menace to rights as dear as life itself. It was disciplined by the immediate duty of defending these by life itself, if need be. That chastened and disciplined conception of liberty is Americanism. We have now the sacred tradition. We have now the liberty. We have now the opportunity. Our task is to restore to it the austerity and the discipline of obligation.

A combination of rights and duties, of obligations and privileges, is the determining idea in those first vehicles of Americanism, our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution. But in interpreting and reaffirming these in state constitutions, laws, and municipal ordinances,—in which for very natural reasons sectional and provincial points of view have often entered,—we have drifted away from the true balance between these fundamental rights and duties, a balance which is at once the delicate spring and the solid rock of our existence. Prosperity, unusual freedom of choice in vocations, varying and broad opportunities to control the vast material resources of the country, have made us complacent about accepting the privileges of a democracy. We have argued among ourselves endlessly as to just what these privileges are and whether perhaps any of them are being infringed. But we have rarely investigated whether we ourselves are giving to the democracy the respect and service that alone can keep it secure. Americanism has become for the great mass of Americans a point of view accompanied by a lukewarm sentiment. The rigor of duty and the ardor of a passionate belief have entered but little.

Through all our defense discussions and legislation, one amazing thing has stood out very clearly—that the great majority of private citizens in America recognize no compelling obligation to place themselves, their time, or their resources at the disposal of the nation. They regard this as a voluntary matter. They frequently question whether the point of national service ought to be raised at all with respect to the law-abiding citizen who earns his living, provides decently for his family, and treats his neighbor with respect. The time and energy outside the office or the job and the necessary duty to home belong to the moving picture or to the pool room, or to any other pleasure to which the freeman wishes to devote them. We have made a fetish of our industrial freedom and we have tied our Americanism to it. The everyday citizen has ceased to balance national opportunities with national duties.

In all the long years of our progress and prosperity no clearer concept or statement of Americanism than this has been made:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, that to secure these Rights, governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

But to these words, clear and solemn, this pledge was added:

“And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our Sacred Honor.”

Nothing was said about “the claims of business,” or being “willing to do anything that may be necessary when the need actually arises.” When the twentieth-century Americans “mutually pledge to each other” these things, we shall cease talking about “reasonable preparedness.” We will arm and train all our manhood. We will restore democracy to the twentieth century. And we will restore Americanism to America!

Restoring our real traditions of liberty is not a vague task. The general principles of liberty as stated in the Declaration of Independence are, in part, very practically interpreted in the Constitution. As there enumerated they include: freedom of religion; freedom of speech; freedom of the press; the right of petition; the right to keep and bear arms; the right to protest against unreasonable searches and seizures; the right of protection for persons and property; the right of trial by jury; the right to vote without abridgment of this right because of race, color, or previous conditions of servitude.

These are only minimum guarantees. There are other rights of far-reaching importance—as the right to profit by a free system of education. And there are besides these rights countless privileges and dignities which no specific enumeration will cover.

At some time and some where this nation began to think of these privileges and opportunities rather in deed than in spirit, and to set them aside as prerogatives for “first Americans.” We began to think of ourselves as better than other men and to create barriers which could not but result in injustice and intolerance. And just at that point we laid the corner stone of our shame to-day.

“First Americans” have already pointed out to us that the framers of the Constitution never foresaw the “Southern European hordes” that now flock here. Perhaps not. But I question if the vision would have disturbed them, or whether it could ever have put greater caution and reserve into the instrument they were drawing up. The magnanimity of spirit there expressed is based upon something greater than philosophy. It is based upon a quality that has nothing to do with changes of times or conditions, a quality of stern fearlessness, a national conviction that the destiny of this nation was to be above all else the safeguard and champion of liberty.

The extent to which we have departed from the ideals set forth in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution is best measured by the way we have come to regard and to treat the most helpless and trusting of our people—the immigrants who come to our shores. Our early policy at Castle Garden was to meet them, advise them, protect them by laws, safeguard their journey, and to consider them as a valuable asset to America and its future development. Compare with this the route of the immigrant in America to-day, keeping in mind our forefathers’ conception of American guarantees of life, liberty, and happiness.

The immigrant arrives at the port of entry. After passing his examination (during which time not a friendly word of greeting is given him, or a personal interest taken in him) he is turned loose upon the city to be met at the gate by cabmen, porters, runners, crooks, thieves, and every conceivable kind of exploiter interested in getting his cash money. This is America’s first reception line. He then meets our second reception line—the employment agent, the private banker, and “steering agent” who derive profit from his labor before it has even become productive. When the immigrant actually goes to work, he has generally lost his money and is in debt. He then meets our third American reception line, the employer interested only in his labor output, and he is treated accordingly. He is generally left alone, to live as best he can, until he begins to save money. This immediately calls forth our fourth reception line—the private banker who renews his acquaintance and offers to help him send his money home; the speculator in land who looks him up; the get-rich-quick concerns that advertise in the papers he reads, and the medical quack who sells him so-called “American” medicines. Some one tells him he may be better off as a citizen, and then appears our fifth American reception line—the politician willing to buy his vote because he needs it, the notary public who is ready to settle his affairs at home so that he can “cut loose,” and the labor leader who thinks now he ought to be organized.

By the time the immigrant has shaken hands along these various reception lines he feels he knows everybody, and he has a very definite idea of liberty, justice, freedom, law, order, and measures of happiness which in no sense accords with our forefathers’ ideal of America.

I sometimes wonder when I see men in the night schools studying our Constitution to enable them to pass their citizenship examinations how they square its teaching with their various experiences under the peonage system of the South; with the robberies by the company store in the coal mines; with the sentences they receive for minor offenses in justice-of-peace courts which have no interpreters; with the prohibition that they cannot work at certain trades, for example in Michigan where they cannot be barbers; with restrictions upon personal liberty, as in Pennsylvania where they cannot keep a dog; with the repeated private bank failures in which all their savings were lost; with the double standard of living under which they see their American neighbors protected and themselves neglected and exploited.

I ask myself if the time will ever come when we shall restore Americanism as the signers of the Declaration of Independence conceived it. We cannot do this until we ourselves believe in practical Americanism. We are coming to realize that the native American who makes the lives of our foreign born wholly subservient to the industrial grind and who neither provides for nor permits them to become American citizens is himself a strong anti-American influence in this country; that the native American who permits the foreign born to enter and denies them the opportunities of America and the right to work, is really anti-American; that the native American who emphasizes the liberties and opportunities of America without correspondingly emphasizing the duties of all American residents is anti-American. We are beginning to see that the native American is anti-American who perpetuates class consciousness and race hatred; who favors or perpetuates the immigrant colony or camp or section with different standards of living, different law enforcement and isolation from American influences; who establishes his own home and his own children in a well-policed, sanitary section of the town and leaves his immigrant neighbor in another section unprotected and living in filth and disorder. We are coming to regard that man as a selfish patriot who consistently and complacently in his factory exacts a physical toll from his workmen without regard to the cost in citizenship to America; and that woman as anti-American who takes a girl into the kitchen because of certain racial excellences, but refuses to consider that these excellences have any social value to America outside the walls of that kitchen and who therefore uses and monopolizes her labor capacity but contributes nothing toward making that girl an American citizen qualified to preside over an American home. We are coming to see that a political leader is a menace to a united America who uses newly naturalized immigrants to swing the American vote in this direction or that, but who does nothing to make the immigrant a good citizen, or even to see that he understands American political ideals.

It is impossible to have the spirit of Americanism prevail in this land when at least a quarter of its people do not understand it, or have been disillusioned in their dream of it, or have been despoiled in their search for it. I do not minimize the value of hardship of obstacles to be overcome. They make for the strength of a nation just as they do for the strength of a human being. But I like to see the obstacles set up in a fair field with no favor—where a man can see them and meet them intelligently. This is what Americanism stands for, but it is not what it means to the average immigrant. We point with pride to the immigrant who succeeds in spite of it, but I suspect that often we judge by his clothes and his house and his speech rather than by his outlook upon life and his inlook upon himself. We satisfy ourselves by comparing his lot here with what it was in his home country—often without real knowledge of either. We fail to see that we have lost the dream of what America may be and with the dream the ability to achieve it, when we become content that America should merely be better than Russia or freer than Austria instead of being the very best of which America is capable.

This country is full of so-called un-American types. Some of them are native born and some are foreign born. Immigrant men and women in this rank of life or that, who have been in this country for years, have found themselves isolated from and ignored by Americans. American customs and standards have therefore failed to alter them. The result is the perpetuation of foreign types or the creation of distinct types which we refuse to accept as ours, but in the making of which we have certainly had a controlling hand. Take the typical foreign-born journalist and publicist. There are hundreds of them to-day fighting the battle of Americanization for their fellow countrymen here against fearful odds because they are so far from being Americanized themselves. Many of them are philosophers, students, zealots; many of them are all-American in aspiration. But they are not themselves in possession of the very Americanism they seek to interpret. And their efforts at Americanizing their fellow countrymen fall as far short as would a piece of philosophy with a man in need of a pick to earn his living, bread to eat, or a tongue with which to speak.

Medical quacks, shyster lawyers, saloon-politicians, chronically bankrupt factory owners or lessees of foreign birth are continually pointed out to us as the types that are being inflicted upon a long-suffering America. They are in fact the types that a negligent America is inflicting upon itself.

How can we expect people from all the nations of the earth, from all kinds of governments and traditions, to understand the principles of liberty, as they have been handed down to us? The one thing they do understand is that the surveillance that prevails in the old country does not prevail here. Take the small business man or small factory operator of foreign birth in New York, the frequenter of the bankruptcy court, the owner of flimsy factory lofts which, when they have been burnt down, show the evasion of the most obvious laws. These men as youths in new America see that every man is free to try his hand at anything he wishes. Seeing only this, they get the idea that the great American game is the strife of one man against the other, that this island of Manhattan and this country are a land of single combat on a large scale, of which competition is the real secret, endurance and cunning and aggression the winning qualities. When they once get this idea, and they often get it very rapidly, they follow it as the dominating principle of their practical existence in America. I say their practical existence, because the methods pursued by many immigrant traders, business and professional men in this country do not represent at all any moral point of view which they have evolved themselves. What they do represent is a practical routine, a thoughtless application of the principles they see Americans practicing all around them. And unlike the Americans, they have no background of American tradition which will interpret differences and distinctions to them and give them a general criterion.

Certain things are essential to elucidating and preserving Americanism. One of these is a common language. Not until the necessity for national defense was thrust upon us have we considered seriously requiring that all American residents learn English. It is true we said in 1906 that all naturalized citizens must have a knowledge of the English language, but we neglected to define what we meant, so the knowledge may consist of as many words as each of several hundred judges may decide is a fair test. Not until the business man found that a knowledge of English reduced accidents did he indorse night schools. Only two states require compulsory attendance of minors under eighteen years of age to learn the English language.

This lack of a common language has prevented the American born and foreign born from getting together in a common Americanism. It has been a closed door to nationalism.

A second is a common citizenship. We have thought of this as the most sacred of rights and have safeguarded it with every possible technicality. Again our policy has been negative, discouraging, and hampering. We have put up the bars with one hand while with the other we have poked holes through the hedges for the political boss. We make it impossible for an alien to acquire citizenship within five years, but permit him to vote—with all that implies—in eight states after he has been there a few months. What conception can he have of how we regard this privilege and right and why has he no compunction in selling it? He leaves his home country to escape military duty and attends meetings in America where he is told he is not even expected to defend this country in case of war. Not one public school in a hundred makes any provisions for teaching him about American conditions, life, and government. Again he finds a closed door to Americanism, and it is small wonder when it is opened that he enters, a skeptic of democracy.

Men work for and defend what is dear to them. When a job is the only stake, it is a rather narrow base for patriotism. The newly arrived immigrant is not given much of an opportunity to have any sentiment or inspiring associations about his job. The average employer feels that when he raises wages he has discharged his full duty to his workman and to his country. But America is concerned not only with what a man earns, but with how he spends it. It is interested in his having a home stake in America, and in his investing in America. Only a prodigal, short-sighted, hand-to-mouth nation can look with indifference upon workmen sending $400,000,000 abroad, and following their savings there each year.

So it is with his living conditions. In the vermin-ridden bunk house the Italian dreams of Italy. In the bungalow with a flower garden Italy is far in the background. The “pursuit of happiness” was mentioned with life and liberty, but as we have forgotten our duties in privileges, so have we neglected happiness for life in terms of gain.

We need a new social impulse back of our patriotism. We have come to the point where we even trifle with the idea that nationalism may be an outworn thing, too parochial a survival to stand the white light of the twentieth century. We have a great deal of social emotion of one kind or another in this country. It has put many healthy ideas into circulation, registered many needed protests. But it has been so remote from the actual business of life, so far removed from the job and the polling booth, that it has done little even for those that have served it best. The prevailing idea of social freedom in this country within the last few years has developed among the industrial groups of our large cities especially a kind of intellectual proletariat, whose creed is active social reform, but whose practice is intellectualism. This constitutes a curious menace to Americanism. It seeks to substitute the “brotherhood of man” for all the loyalties and obligations and relationships of life. I saw a month or two ago in a widely circulated magazine a symposium to which many writers and publicists contributed, stating whether or not they “believed in patriotism” and saw any validity in it. Some did and some did not. It was discussed as if it were the protective tariff.

The I. W. W.’s urge their followers to ignore national lines and unite only as “Workers of the World.” And a great many of those followers, truly united in their passion for industrial freedom, hoodwink themselves into believing that in this bond all the debts and privileges of a national citizenship are more than included. They come to speak slightingly of those that still hold to so practical a loyalty. The immigrants, wavering between two loyalties and firmly fixed in neither, and especially the immigrants who come from those countries where the social sense is strongly developed, are especially drawn or think they are by the appeal of a loyalty to “no God and no master”—and respond readily to the flexible and not too confining idea of brotherhood. The idea moves and sways the throng. But when they go home to their crowded rooms in tenements, when they go the next morning to the job, when they deal with property, those men and women need a government, understanding and equable, to carry and control the conditions of their lives, to safeguard their rights, to aid them to right their wrongs. It alone can give them the guarantees and the tradition of industrial freedom. They need a loyalty.

We must learn to care. Our hearts must be on fire with belief, or we shall never have Americanism. We need to go back again to the sources of our liberty and relight our torches there. It is because we have not Americanism in our hearts and souls, because we have not been through the process of Americanization, because we have become slaves to prosperity and faithless to our ideals that we have failed Europe at a critical time. Americanism has become a phrase, a trademark, a passport. Unless somehow and somewhere we can restore belief and zeal and faith in our destiny we face the disunion of this Republic into races and creeds, into sectionalism and localism, into class warfare between capital and labor, into selfish individualism rather than nationalism.

CHAPTER III
The Native American

I find the future of America a far more hopeful and beautiful thing to contemplate from the trenches of a new subway than from a Fifth Avenue bus. Perhaps it is because in one is seen the raw material of hopes, ideals, and ambitions in the making,—a people eagerly looking forward; while in the other these ideals are already fashioned, perhaps discarded,—a people looking backward. I am not more afraid of the ignorant vote than of the absent vote; of the discontented alien than of the satisfied American; of the hungry laborer than of the surfeited idler; of the casual laborer than of the overworked industrial captain; of the patient, plodding hand toiler than of the dreamer of the get-rich-quick concerns; of the alien with the family back home than of the American with no family at all. They all go to make up one America.

When we think of a united America, our minds naturally turn to Americanizing the immigrant. Big as that task is, I do not believe that our greatest difficulty lies with him. Rather I fear that we shall have to Americanize our native Americans first—in increased respect for the flag, in conscious renewed allegiance to America, in the patriotic use of the nation’s holidays, in measures of national service. We have, I think, to return to the civilian training camp and universal service as a melting pot for natives before we can make America a successful melting pot for aliens.

The average native American is local, provincial, self-interested, constitutionally opposed to any change that may threaten his particular established local order. The average native employer looks askance at anything that may upset his labor supply, be that a shop census or workmen’s compensation. The average native employee does not take to such new-fangled ideas as health insurance and promotion based on record. It is the native-born American woman who crosses to the American side of the street and who still meets and discusses the immigrant as a problem. I suspect it was a native American who dubbed the Italians “dagoes,” the Hungarians, “hunkies,” the Lithuanians “round heads,” and so on. There is no better invention for prolonging personal conflict than derisive nicknames, and America seems to have done its share in this direction.

It is natural that those who carry responsibilities should be conservative, but the native American seems to me to carry this responsibility to the verge of reaction and antagonism. I am reminded of a time when I had occasion to summon an employer and employee before me for a hearing upon a wage dispute and was reminded that it was presumption to set the employee opposite the employer to discuss such a trivial matter on equal terms. I am constantly asked to entertain women’s clubs who find immigration “interesting,” but whose members shrink from the neighborly services which they might render in their own communities.

There are always many exceptions to any general statement. But this does not alter the fact that the native American has a point of view, a state of mind, a prejudiced observance, a sense of superiority—which makes him greatly in need of Americanization. This is acquired by the native boy and girl early in life. What opportunity has the average native-born boy and girl to learn about American citizenship and its duties and rights? The public and parochial schools give little more than history and an indifferent kind of civil government, which seems to us as we learn it to have little to do with us or our future. Our patriotic days are largely holidays from school, filled with fun and pranks, but rarely with any sense of their real significance. They seem to have nothing to do with the very freedom we enjoy on those days. The boy becomes a voter by the mere act of registering his name. The average girl is unconscious that she ever becomes a citizen unless she is interested in suffrage or anti-suffrage, or unless practical property questions arise. We can hardly expect under these conditions much realization of what nationalism means, or that a call to national service will meet with much response. The surprising thing is that in spite of our official neglect and indifference, youths are filled with patriotism and desire to serve, if it can be utilized before the shop and home absorb all their energies.

I believe that a really careful, impartial analysis of our situation to-day would reveal two things: that there are two main systems of thought and lines of activity upon which the hope and future of America depend—one is government and the other is business. They alone have a nation-wide organization, whose units reach every American community and every American resident. To the government we look for law, order, education, justice, and the essentials of community life; to the industry for the job or the market which gives life to the community. Go where you will, in the last analysis a native American controls the situation. The man higher up, if you go high enough, is invariably a native-born American. It is said that there are more native-born sons of Connecticut in Oregon than in Connecticut, but the great industries of Connecticut that set the pace for the state are in the hands of native Americans. So it is with government. Minor offices, sometimes even important offices, are in the hands of naturalized citizens, but usually with the consent or approval of some native American—sometimes far removed from the scene of action.

The radius of this native American influence bears no relation to numbers. It encompasses the school, the home, the neighborhood, the personal life of the resident. We fill our night schools by adjusting them to the industrial organization and securing its coöperation. We fill our civilian training camps by the coöperation of employers in granting absences and paying wages. We obtain a common standard of living by enforcement of laws that set the standard. Civic and philanthropic agencies may be the pioneers, the educators, the balance restorers; they can care for the waste and discover causes. But America has too long regarded them as the unifiers of its many peoples, as the makers of citizens. We now know that this task comes squarely back to the political and industrial leader and to no other; to the native born and to no other.

America is the proud possessor of some significant and far-reaching illusions which make a poor foundation for the structures it is seeking to build. Chief among these is the assertion that the immigrant lowers the American standard of living. In the final analysis it is America that lowers the immigrant’s own standard of living. A double standard of living is imposed upon the immigrant by the responsible native American.

Of the many hundreds of immigrant communities which I have studied, I recall none in which American ideals were being aggressively menaced by immigrants who were determined to have none of them. Isolation, betrayal of our own minimum social and civic standards, these I have seen over and over again. But always the immigrant population has been the weaker force in any given community. There are in the country to-day hundreds of towns, say of 1500 population, in which the foreign born number one half. But in civic strength, social influence, and political power, the immigrant 50 per cent measures less than 10 per cent. In the census they appear as towns of 1500. In reality the native-born residents of these towns consider them as towns of about 500—with an unfortunate though necessarily large annex of immigrant workmen and their families who live “on the other side of the railroad” or in some other segregated spot—to which fire and water systems, garbage collections and calling do not penetrate. Now there can be no doubt that that large “annex” is a menace to the future of America. But it is a menace produced by American neglect, not by immigrant aggression and malevolence.

We shall never solve the immigration problem so long as we begin with the immigrant’s shortcomings, nor shall we attain Americanism so long as we define it as nativism. We need not fear that we are not as much in control as we ever were. We set the standards. The question is whether we have cause to be satisfied with the way in which we do it. The ideals and standards of America are set by the American born to-day just as they were in our early history. In all communities which I have studied the American-born residents or employers are the determining factors. The citizen may send you through many devious channels, to see this boss and that boss, to win friends for your cause from this foreign-born leader or that immigrant saloon-keeper, but eventually you deal with a native American, not with an alien.

Mr. Ross, in the “Old World in the New,” points to a typical Western town of 26,000 inhabitants, 10,000 of them immigrants, and gives a picture of the vice, intemperance, bad housing, and wretched standards of living resulting in this town from the immigrant population. We in America believe in majority rule. There was a safe margin of 6000 Americans in that town, free to establish and insist upon any standard they chose. Why were the Americans beaten in the struggle? Because here as in many places they ignored or definitely isolated the immigrants, permitting them to work all day with Americans at the mills or factories where they were needed, and then encouraging or compelling them to spend all the rest of their time in their own corner of the town, and to encroach no more than necessary upon the respectable streets and schools and churches and recreations of the American section.

Persecuted America! Miss Repplier, lamenting the immigrant invasion of Philadelphia, in the Atlantic Monthly not long ago, presents a truly colonial point of view concerning the suffering wrought by the twentieth-century world of America in this colonial stronghold. In the mind of Miss Repplier and many thousands of Americans the long-suffering American, heir of all the ages, legatee of all the best traditions of liberty and opportunity sealed in 1776, is now driven like sheep before the advancing immigrant hordes:

“Dirt is a valuable asset in the immigrant’s hands. With its help he drives away decent neighbors, and brings property down to his level and his purse. The ill-fated Philadelphian is literally pushed out of his home—the only place, sighs Mrs. Pennell, where he wants to live—by conditions that he is unable to avert, and unwilling, as well as unfitted, to endure.”

Old Philadelphians that would never have run from an Indian, that would have conquered the forests and spanned the rivers, run from the Italian and the Pole. Alas! We too have deteriorated. We see nothing dramatic, we feel no challenge, in the fight to raise the standards of our less fortunate neighborhoods. We cannot find any inspiration in that ideal of justice which insists on law enforcement equally among all residents of a neighborhood. Is there nothing to be said on behalf of the neighborly, friendly visiting which would soon make dirt as unfashionable in the immigrant’s as in the Philadelphian’s home? The reason that the tenement fire escapes are cluttered in Rivington Street and free on Fifth Avenue is not, as we fondly suppose, that immigrants prefer fire escapes draped with bedding and pillows and children. The answer is that they move to Fifth Avenue as soon as their income permits and as fast as they learn how well it is possible to live in America.

Let us take a town in the making and see if the standards do not come back to some native American. Take, for instance, the towns that have grown up during the war-order prosperity, which is typical of our town building in the past in America. American capital, directed by native-American enterprise and brains, selects a site and builds a model factory, secures the necessary transportation facilities and puts in its power and machines. Anything else? Yes, the skilled labor market is scarce of men, so a few good houses are put up for skilled workmen, upon whom the operation of the plant depends.

As for the mass of foreign-born unskilled workmen, relying upon a well-stocked market, no provision is made for housing, sanitation, or other care of them. This is left to the individual workman and to the speculator. When a cluster of huts, tents, or bunk houses spring up, is it because the immigrant prefers the huts or tents, or is it because the only power to create standards—the native-American power—has ignored its obligation?

It is the same with contract work. The contractor, in figuring the cost of road building, includes not only materials, grades, etc., but the cost of decent housing for his American workmen. The immigrant workman he leaves to the padrone. The padrone is one of the most anti-American forces in this country, and he exists only by the grace of the native-born American employer. No immigrant body can impose him upon an employer who does not find him useful.

I am invariably met with the fact that native Americans refuse to rent to immigrants because of their alleged defacement of property. The one remedy seems to be eviction and refusal to rent. I have not yet found that a limitation on boarders in the rental clause has been tried or that any effort has been made to teach these tenants the meaning and methods of an American standard of living. I have not found that such conveniences as an adequate and accessible water supply, garbage collection, prompt repairs, and interest in the well-being of the tenants bear in the mind of the landlord much relation to care of person and property. The native American thinks of the immigrant tenant as an inferior human being, used to something quite different, and almost unconsciously brings the American standard down to his own idea of the immigrant’s capacities.

There are, of course, many people—not confined to immigrants—who are indifferent to or incapable of maintaining an American standard of living. Eliminating these, I believe that the native American can and must set the standard, pay decent enough wages to make it possible, and then admit no excuses whatever for non-performance. In my judgment it is a fallacy to suppose that increased wages and shorter hours alone will Americanize America, unless there goes with these things some education as to their use.

Paternalism? I have in mind a steel mill where the employer has increased wages 50 per cent, and established eight-hour shifts; where the most perfect conditions prevail in his plant, where his first-aid and safety-first work are excellent. He believes that to build company houses would be paternalism. Almost every one in the town works in his mill. He has added 5000 workmen to the village within a year. No private capital will take the risk of building houses for his war industry. His men sleep 5 to 15 in a room, often on the floor and in their clothing; they have no care and eat badly prepared food. They crowd family houses, destroying privacy and morality. That plant employed last year 34,000 men to keep an average of 15,000. This registers the immigrant’s protest,—the only one possible,—moving on. Yet one native-born American controls the health, decency, morality, and efficiency of some 8000 immigrant workmen whose only protest is to move on, and whose only future is high enough wages to return to his home country.

And the worst of it is that men get used to these conditions, believing them to be American, and with this belief go the dreams, the visions, and ambitions which are the essence of good citizenship. The prospective good citizen is sacrificed to the demand for cheap labor which is a native-American demand. For the few hundreds of men that are indifferent to or incapable of appreciating an American standard of living thousands are sacrificed daily at the hearth of the indifferent, complacent native American who thinks of them only as cogs in his machine and rarely as future citizens of America.

There is no more representative class of native Americans in the popular mind than those bearing old family names. The youth of America read and store up all the available information about them and aim to duplicate their achievements in dress, manner, entertainments, and work. And yet I can take you to any one of the great estates that they occupy, and if they employ immigrant labor, you will find it housed in miserable shacks, lacking the decencies and comforts of an American standard of living. You will find that the native Americans had these shacks put up and receive rent for them. You will find also that the immigrant has but one choice, to leave his job if he wants something better. Ask yourself, as an American with a family dependent upon you, whether you would have the courage to make this choice. I have in mind as I write a most exclusive club which is the wonder of the Hudson Valley for sheer beauty and order; and I see below the railroad track its thousand employees who toil all day to produce that beauty, housed in wretched frame buildings in bad repair and crowded with boarders because there are not enough houses. I find there the future citizens of America being brought up without regard to decency and morality, living 5 to 10 in a room, while the little native-born boy or girl in the clubhouses has a room and a bath to himself. Now this difference is not alone the difference of wealth. It goes deeper than that. The club owns the workmen’s houses; it gets an adequate return on its investment. The trouble is the native American does not regard the immigrant as anything but a workman—and so long as he ignores America’s interest in that man as a citizen, as a defender of America, as a voter, as a future taxpayer, he is anti-American. To these men, preaching patriotism and freedom in America must seem the height of insincerity when contemplated from overcrowded rooms under a leaky roof. Last Fourth of July the National Americanization Committee instituted “Americanization Day” when native-born citizens tendered receptions to foreign-born citizens. When foreign-born men wrote saying that although they had been here many years it was the first time they had shaken hands with an American, it demonstrated how wide is the gulf of our prejudice and its consequent neglect. The pay envelope has made a poor melting pot, and America is to-day paying the cost of an experiment that has failed. Whenever we have established lines that make our native Americans inaccessible to our foreign-born residents, there we have established the unknown quantity in fixing the responsibility for the immigrant standard of living, without which knowledge the truth can never be ascertained.

What I am urging is this: Before we assert so calmly that the immigrant lowers the American standard of living let us rest our case with the man higher up—if need be with the financier who supplies the capital and requires that all material conditions must be right, but who forgets that in the last analysis the success of any enterprise depends upon loyal, efficient workmen with a home stake in America.

Another native-American illusion is that the immigrant will not appreciate our efforts. Since when has America based its principles of action upon the flimsy desire for appreciation? Furthermore we expect the appreciation to be out of all proportion to what we do. We have indeed deteriorated when we have come to regard simple acts of justice, fair play, service, obligation, and duty as acts to be persisted in only when the immigrant is duly appreciative! Such a stimulus would have done little to develop the northwest and to conquer the resources of the country. The man who hesitates to build houses for his homeless or commuting workmen because it may be paternalism, closes the club-house he has provided because it is not appreciated, or bewails his empty playground as a species of rank ingratitude. A great weakness of the American character to-day is its desire for appreciation and credit, and it does not make for Americanism.

A third American illusion is that the native American always thinks of the immigrants as getting something from America—wages or liberty or opportunity or rights. We forget that the majority of them come to us as laborers, representing a net contribution of at least $1000, which is the cost of raising a native-born child to the productive age. In these days of prosperity, of new vision in business, of expansion marked by a remarkable greatness of spirit, it is no time to forget that the very industries which are at present by way of putting America in the front ranks of trade and commerce are dependent upon immigrant labor.

We know in a general way that the immigrant is the possessor of much brawn and muscle. But it is characteristic of us that we think of him always as a job hunter, not as a producer. His may be the opportunity; but we never reflect that ours may be the profit. The big mine owner, the subway contractor, the chief engineer of the railroads, the canal builder have a practical knowledge of just where, and how largely, the immigrant comes into new America’s scheme. But the average American has no grasp of the full significance of the immigrant’s immediate and present service to him and to the nation, in a purely present and industrial way.

He knows that a big army of immigrants armed with pick and shovel is down there in the subway cavity; and he knows that they build the roads over which he spins his motor. Still he does not really grasp the fact that the railroad that carries him, the clothes he wears, the cigars he smokes, the furniture he puts in his house are made by immigrant hands. Take iron and steel, the strategic industry, so to speak, in America to-day. The Federal Immigration Commission found that 57.7 per cent of the workmen in this industry were foreign born; and if you add the workmen of foreign-born parentage, the percentage mounts to 71.7. And so it goes through a long list of essential industries—in sugar refining, 85 per cent of the workmen are foreign born; in bituminous coal mining, 61.9 per cent; and so on. And there is no one to take his place. There are to-day three jobs for every two workmen, and we are calling out our reserve of women who have never before worked for wages. We often hear of the displaced American workmen, but when we look for them, we generally find they have moved up in the economic scale.

What other value are immigrants in American life? What percentage do they possess of the social opportunity and liberty of America? What percentage do they contribute to it? What percentage are they permitted to contribute to it?

Some immigrants come to us with racial powers, instincts, and susceptibilities, which, however modified by years of peasant toil, have great potential value for America. Some come to us with vision trained for centuries in beauty of line and color, with the skilled hands of races that have been shaping arch or temple or cathedral for thousands of years. They feel beauty and mobility of outline as only those feel them who have lived with them for generations. What becomes of these capacities over here? Does America give immigrants the chance to use them? Does America even know they exist?

Another illusion is that the present races coming to America are not easily assimilated, and should they be, they would give America an undesirable type.

What, after all, is Americanism? What is the destiny of America? What do we want it to be? What, in the great evolution of nations, is it bound to be? Until the average American meets and answers these questions squarely, we cannot settle the question of what races are best for the future of America. Miss Repplier quotes Dr. Horace Kallen as saying, “Only men who are alike in origin and spirit and not abstractly can be truly equal, and maintain that inward unanimity of action and outlook which makes a national life.” And, says Miss Repplier, rightly, “We have no mutual understanding, no common denominator.”

We have not. The first Americans whose opportunity, yes, and whose responsibility it was to produce these, have failed ignominiously to do so. “An Englishman,” says Miss Repplier, “knows that a Russian Jew cannot in five years or in twenty-five years become English; that his standards and ideals are not convertible into English standards and ideals. A Frenchman does not see in a Bulgarian or a Czech the making of another Frenchman.”

True, but what is an American? Is he an Anglo-Saxon racial type, and if so, by what law? Do we desire him to be this?

I do not despise the conclusion of ethnologists, but they seem to have so few conclusions and so many theories. And the root of them seems to be, not experience, but apprehension. Meanwhile, I see all around me valiant Americans, Southern European by birth and tradition, Americans now in spirit and loyalty and tendency. These men and women have mastered the opportunity—for they had to seek and improve it themselves—to become assimilated. In spite of the thousands of their countrymen among us, still un-American, I am convinced of two things: That America can control its own destiny, that one of the greatest obstacles has been slothful neglect, another obstacle, nativism; and that the way to attain control of our destiny is by aggressive, not passive, Americanism. When this is under way, it will be easy enough to sort out and deal separately and finally with undesirable races and types or those that have no desire to become Americans.

In the midst of all our discussion of to-day about a prepared America, there is no national policy emerging. We see Congress half-heartedly bolstering up the army and navy. We see the Federal Bureau of Immigration without adequate authority at work upon a Federal system of employment exchanges, a system which can be overturned by successors in office. We see the Bureau of Naturalization at work on a citizenship program into which it jumps without preparation, preëmpting a field long occupied by its neighbor in the Interior Department, the Bureau of Education, without a suggestion of real coöperation. We see the Bureau of Education with an unlimited field before it, hampered by state lines and no funds. We have laws demanding that an alien shall learn English and have a knowledge of the Constitution in order to become a citizen, yet leaving it to the ward boss to supply the information. We see the various departments dealing with various phases of preparedness pursuing a path of departmental routine, waste, and duplication. No clear uniform note runs through it all. There is little apparent indication that times have changed and new issues and opportunities are presented to our American government. We see the field of transportation and distribution cut into small sections by local regulations and local competition. One state is pitted against another to secure labor for the development of the individual state—with no thought of national needs.

Surely we cannot, in all fairness, expect the immigrant to distribute himself wisely, to protect himself adequately, to educate himself intelligently, to become a willing citizen without the full coöperation of the native American. Yet upon this whole matter we have no national sense of responsibility, no national consciousness. If a practical bill providing for a national Americanization policy, to be administered by national authority but leaving to states and counties and cities their due rights and obligations, were at this moment before Congress, it would have small chance of being considered. The trouble is that we have no convinced body of native Americans behind it to support it.

We have not had a vision of many peoples making one nation, but rather of a few people being worked for by others. Even kindhearted employers with “welfare departments” for their men have little realization of their immigrant workmen as future American people. In many cases the welfare provisions and company housing specifically do not apply to the immigrant force. The average American housewife does not think of the immigrant and her future in America when she needs a servant, but wonders what nationality will suit her best. I should like to ask how many of our housewives, even our suffragist housewives, know the attitude of their foreign-born servants towards America or how well they are fitted for citizenship? Are they regarded as a civic factor of any importance? The average American officer regards the immigrant as a trouble-maker; but how many cities compile their laws intelligently in a language the immigrant can read, so that he may not become one? It is the native-born American who must separate the wheat from the chaff before we can estimate the wheat and dispose of the chaff.

We cannot treat the immigrant as if he were something to be absorbed, automatically, by inevitable chemical reaction, in the course of time. He is a living, changing, creative organism, needing attention at every minute, and with something to contribute at every point. From the moment he arrives in America he needs the creative, aggressive attention of American institutions if he is to become a good American. What he gets, when he gets anything, is a chance to touch here and there American institutions adapted to a native-born population and barely fulfilling the needs of the native born. Take the case of the immigrant who arrives at Ellis Island and goes, let us say, to a New England mill town. Originally it was a conservative little colonial town of 1000 population with no large industries, and with schools, churches, and a library adapted to the population. The introduction of several factories increases the population fourfold, and 75 per cent of the newcomers are foreign born, needing especially to profit by the organized institutions of America. But what really happens is that the institutions adapted to the original 1000 native Americans remain exactly the same—schools, churches, library, court, and houses, for the host of new Americans to fit into them as best they can. In other words, although immigrants may make up from one half to two thirds of that town they do not figure 10 per cent in its activities or 10 per cent in its government or its facilities.

The native-born American has set up some very important and flourishing institutions to perpetuate the ideals of Americanism and to preserve the things dear to him. These have come also to be regarded as the institutions for Americanizing the immigrant. If they Americanize our native-born youth, why not our foreign-born peoples? The native American has adapted them to his own needs and assumes that they will do for every one. Will they, without any further attention on his part?

The public school comes first. It is the first aid to the nation. It also represents a fundamental principle and obligation in American civilization. Of the 13,000,000 men and women born in other lands, 3,000,000 of them were unable to speak English, according to the 1910 census, and only 38,000 were enrolled in our public schools to learn it. Many important communities, in such important industrial states as Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut, where the population is at least one half immigrant, do not maintain any classes whatever where English can be learned.

Even where night schools exist, they are likely to be conducted in an experimental or detached way—as a benevolent “extension” of the public educational system rather than as a legitimate, highly important, and necessary part of public policy. In a city in which 75 per cent of the population is either foreign born or of foreign parentage, the president of the board of education said this year: “More night schools for foreigners—well, I don’t know. I am highly interested in the technical night high schools. If there is any money left after these are fully organized, I will see that it goes into classes for English to foreigners.”

But there never is anything left. On that basis we shall get nowhere. If the alien is to be taught English in this country only after every form of education life is “fully organized”—he will by that time have reached the point where he either cannot or will not be taught. When will America learn that teaching immigrants English and requiring them to learn it is a fundamental necessity, a condition of national vitality?

The Bureau of Naturalization is publishing a statement that during the past year 600 cities have conducted, initiated, or largely extended night-school instruction for aliens. With the usual optimism we point with pride to what America is doing with the native-American taxpayer’s money. Do we not want to know how effective it is? In how many of these 600 cities has this night-school work been put on a basis adequate to the numbers of the foreign-born population? In how many of the 600 has a really adequate system of instruction been worked out—adapted to the needs, trades, shifts, hours of the men, providing for proper classification, textbooks, teachers with vigor and understanding? How long have the terms been and did the immigrants attend?

We should naturally expect New England to lead in this phase of an Americanization policy. According to the data gathered by the Bureau of Education in 1915, Maine had 15 towns with over 1000 foreign born in the population, with no evening schools. Massachusetts had 28, New Hampshire and Vermont each 6, and Rhode Island 4. In Connecticut there are 15 towns with a foreign-born population of over 1000 that have no evening school or other municipal provision for learning citizenship and English. There is no town in the state that has adequate or anything like adequate provisions for this. Yet New Haven has approximately 50,000 foreign born, Bridgeport 40,000, Hartford 35,000, Meriden 10,000, Waterbury 25,000, Stamford 12,000. Concerning Connecticut the lament of nativism that the “State is rapidly being foreignized” is coming loud and strong. And it is true. How, with the situation described above, could it be otherwise?

For the immigrant in the courts our cherished “equality before the law” is not realized. There have been a great many studies and investigations into the “immigrant’s influence on crime” and his responsibility for this or that percentage of it. But there has never been a constructive effort to make the machinery of the law adaptable to the immigrant. With thoroughgoing nativism, the native-born Americans have set up the kinds of courts they need for themselves, and have installed forms of procedure that they know and understand. They proceed on the assumption that every man knows the law, and that every man can tell his tale in English. These assumptions were justified, back in the days when our courts were founded. A man used to the town-meeting scheme of government knew of what government consisted and what it entailed. In answer to requests for interpreters, for the distribution of information concerning laws, for modifications of judgments where ignorance was the cause of the violation, we are constantly met with the unsympathetic statement that if the system is good enough for Americans and for America, it is good enough for the Italians and the Germans and the Irish and the Jews and the Russians. We so seldom think of laws and courts as educational, as incentives to right doing, but always as punitive, even though this may be the immigrant’s first contact with this leading American institution.

An immigrant lands in America and gets whatever work he can. He does not know, and no governmental agency takes the trouble to tell him, what particular restrictions there are on any given occupation. No one explains to him for which job he has to have a license or which occupations are open only to citizens. He does not know our ordinances about the disposal of garbage or ashes. He may come from a region where there are no free schools, and he does not know that the law in this country obliges him to send his children to school. Unwittingly, with the best intentions in the world, he may offend in almost every relation of his life. Suppose that he does offend and is brought into court. If he cannot speak English, he is supposed to rely on the court interpreter. In many places there is no court interpreter. In Chicago, a short time ago, an investigation of courts disclosed the fact that the judge sometimes had to order volunteer interpreters to leave the room because they were interpreting wrongly time after time. The judges stated that there were a few men of that kind who made a practice of hanging around the courts and interpreting wrongly whenever it was to their advantage to do so.

Unable to make himself understood, and without competent and honest assistance from an interpreter, the alien is placed at an additional disadvantage in our courts. Ignorant of his rights, not understanding what his offense is, he is tried and convicted, and leaves the court wondering what he has done that justifies it in branding him as a law breaker. His respect for American law and for American justice does not outlive many experiences of this kind, and another door to Americanism is closed.

Our journals are also nativistic. We are known as a country ruled and governed by our newspapers, which are said to be able to make and unmake political parties, and to raise a politician or statesman to a dizzy pinnacle of fame or else to cast him headlong into oblivion. The average paper has page after page—on Saturdays and Sundays, section after section—full of articles that are suggestive and instructive to those who have their bearings already, but a helpless, hopeless maze to those who have come to America so recently that they still need an occasional signpost to guide them through our political mazes. It seems to be assumed that the readers know the form, the history, the value, and the significance of American institutions, and need only to have them attended to or referred to, the more casually the better. Some of our most significant journals take apparent pride in being cryptic. They ignore the presence in this country of millions who need to be informed, who ardently desire information, about our history and our institutions, and who do not know where they can obtain it from an English-speaking source.

About 9,000,000 people in this country read foreign-language newspapers. Some of them are persons who read these papers largely from necessity while they are learning English, and some of them never intend to learn, and never do learn, English at all. An immigrant who arrives in this country without being able to speak English finds that it takes a considerable time to learn it—the length of time depending on the place he finds work in and the people he works with. Now in this period, long or short, which must elapse before the alien learns English, the foreign-language newspaper could be an invaluable Americanizing agent. But it cannot be so without the coöperation of the native press and native Americans. And that we have never given. Our big manufacturers advertise in thousands of these papers to sell goods. Otherwise we do not concern ourselves with them at all, except to regard all with suspicion when we learn of the disloyalty of one. Many of the editors of these papers, themselves not Americanized in any complete sense, are making inadequate but persistent efforts to connect their people with American institutions to lead them to become Americans, real citizens of this republic. They get little help from us. The American press is increasingly proud of its position as one of the very greatest of our social institutions. It is run for labor, for capital, for society, for business, for the man in the street; but it is run very little for the foreign-born citizen or alien who against odds is trying to accomplish his own assimilation. Yet this is exactly the task in which the newspaper that considered his interests and his needs could help him most.

The public library, especially in cities where public school branches are maintained, has a great opportunity to reach the adult immigrant in his own neighborhood, in community reading rooms, by providing newspapers, books in the native language, simple books about America, either in English or translated into the native tongue. Whenever public library facilities are extended to immigrants, there is ample testimony to the enthusiasm with which they are received. A few years ago the management of the New York City public library in a very interesting report gave some startling figures covering the patronage of the public libraries by the foreign born of New York City, showing that they were exceptionally eager and persistent readers, and of the more serious forms of literature—history, philosophy, science, and drama. In hundreds of industrial towns of the country the public library is a virtual mausoleum, a monument to culture, little used but “always there.” Whole sections of the town that have never found the way to the library, and who might not be made welcome if they did, are starving for some recreative interest, some sources of information which they could manage.

But here occurs a stumblingblock. The native American has a prejudice against furnishing books in a foreign language and often proceeds on the theory that although he does nothing to furnish facilities for learning English, it is better that the immigrant should read nothing while he waits.

It is idle to fear that the foreign-language book is an obstacle to Americanization. Anything that increases the alien’s intelligence, and especially his information about America, is an aid, not a hindrance. Outside of the large cities few libraries have any collection of foreign books. Those that do are likely to have an entirely academic or classical assortment. A few weeks ago, in investigating the public library facilities of one of our big steel towns, now given over to the production of munitions, it was discovered that the foreign language “collection” adapted to the races in the town consisted of one Polish book. In one industrial town which is heavily immigrant a public library a few weeks ago opened a branch in a foreign bank—and, as might be expected, it is flourishing.

One of the chief American grievances against the immigrant is that he does not spend or invest his money here. Until the establishment of the postal savings banks he had little encouragement to do so. Here again we cling stubbornly to our nativism, and maintain that arrangements that are satisfactory to the native born are good enough for the foreign born as well. Few banks have foreign departments, although of late the number is increasing. The ordinary bank is not adapted to the immigrant. He is intimidated by it and is not always welcome. That 59 per cent of the present investors in the Postal Savings Banks are foreign born, and that this 59 per cent owns 72 per cent of all the money now on deposit is significant proof that the immigrant will use our banks as an institution.

If I have given the impression that the entire responsibility for Americanism is the native American’s, I have failed in my purpose. I have but attempted to restore the balance and point out the really controlling factor in Americanism.

If I have failed to note the many very important and excellent movements now under way in the name of reform and paid by benevolence, it is not that I underestimate their value. It is because I want the native American to realize that reform and philanthropy are no more now to be the custodians of Americanism than when the Declaration of Independence was signed. It is the average business man in his plant and the average official in his government office that must preserve it in every thought, act, and ambition of the day’s routine work—carrying always the overhead charge of patriotism and nationalism.

This fixing of initial responsibility does not mean that the immigrant has no responsibility. Far from it. He must be ready to stay in America, to become a citizen, to adopt American standards, to obey our laws, to meet his obligations, to do his duty, to assume his responsibilities for, as well as to exercise, his rights. But he must know what these are. He must realize that the native American knows what they are and will set him a good example. He must be told that he is expected to meet the requirements or America does not want him and will not keep him. Our admission and exclusion laws serve no such notice on him. The literacy test is a plain evasion of the native American’s responsibility and a lazy way of thinking out the problem. We native Americans in business or in office have never addressed ourselves seriously to the task of making Americans or nationalizing America. When we do, we shall have as strong a nation as we have bridges and railways and banks.

It is possible that we have been admitting too many people of too wide a variety for the native American to Americanize. It is certainly true that we should hesitate to admit many others until we have demonstrated our ability to provide an assimilation policy for the nation. We cannot forever depend upon the missionary for the Americanization of aliens. Shall we close the doors as the only way to preserve Americanism? Will this be a confession of our utter failure to deal in a statesmanlike way with either the international or national situation which confronts us?

It seems to me that our real enemy is not an aggressive foreignism, but a passive, complacent Americanism or nativism. What we really need to fear is, not that we shall be invaded by civilizations and ideals we cannot assimilate, but that we shall fail to develop and perpetuate and extend to all Americans the civilization and the ideals we firmly believe to be American.

I consider that a most dangerous fallacy in this country to-day is the belief that the evils that have overtaken us through the immigrant are the result of an undue expansion of our hospitality, an undue breadth of interpretation of America as the land of liberty, open to all. What we are really suffering from is not undue expansion but undue contraction, a determined withdrawal of native Americans from the real situation in America, a positive refusal to face their destiny, a stupid neglect to provide anything for the immigrant but a job.

It seems to me the height of complacent nativism to ascribe our social and political evils to unrestricted immigration, when as a matter of fact we have never developed facilities for assimilating them or given the matter much constructive attention of any kind. We have no information concerning the numbers and kinds of immigrants which our country and our institutions can assimilate, and until we have these we are not in a position for judgment.

I believe emphatically that unless America can show itself worthy of its traditions and opportunities, we should not be honored nor sought as “an asylum for the oppressed,” nor be regarded as “a refuge from tyranny,” and that we should close our doors and put up a sign that means what we say. I am equally positive that we should give a constructive policy a fair trial—starting at Ellis Island and following the alien to the last hamlet with information, advice, and protection, with assurance of equality before the law in all respects, and giving him the full guarantees of our Constitution. If under these conditions he prefers his home language to ours, pays his allegiance to a country other than America, sends his savings home to be invested, persists in a second-rate standard of living, asserts his rights but refuses to meet his duties, reads the foreign language press instead of the American, joins the racial society instead of the city club,—then we shall know the fault is not the native American’s, and we can put up the bars with a clear conscience and with courage in our hearts.

Americanism faces the future and is courageous. Nativism faces the past and is apprehensive. Never in the history of nations shall we have a greater opportunity to attain stability and leadership than now. The native American has in his own hands the power to build a great future for his land. He has the needed qualities, too; he has an idealism such as the world never witnessed before, in so high a degree as to seem naïve or childish to citizens of older races dyed in intrigue and used to always looking for the hidden motive under every apparently open move. He has courage and a faith in liberty detached though it sometimes is from his daily life. And I am one of those who hold that he still believes in equality—in spite of the manifold contradictions we see all about us.

But he is, as we have seen, blind beyond parallel to his opportunities—to a degree that makes us question sometimes whether he has not, after all, committed the unpardonable sin of sinning against the light. He has been stupid, foolish, trivial. He has been content to treat his belief in liberty and equality as many a man treats his religion—as something precious, but not to be used in daily life.

It is not too late for the American to face about from his nativism, from his contentment with considering only the needs and interests of the native born, and to consider the needs of America as a whole, America as he sees it and meets it every day, in his shop or mill,—the America of the native born and the foreign born as well. Let him but recognize once for all that the foreigner’s needs are the same as his needs, that everyone wants a decent home and a place to sit in, and book or paper to read, a safe place to keep his savings, a chance for himself and his family to keep well,—all the varied needs of the body and the soul,—let him but recognize that the alien and the native-born both need and desire these things, and then make it his responsibility to provide them and the battle will be won.

We are the great adventure of the twentieth century. And the foes we have to fear are not the hosts that come to us to profit by our liberty and opportunity, but the lack of wisdom and of courage that makes us unfit to administer our heritage and to meet our destiny. Nativism is no substitute for Americanism.

CHAPTER IV
America-made Citizens

When is a citizen not a citizen? The great game of hide and seek in America might well be called citizenship. Every naturalized male alien is a citizen as long as he stays here; but if his home country was Turkey, it is not safe for him to get back into its jurisdiction. In New York state the alien waits five years to become a citizen and vote; in Nebraska and half a dozen other states he has only to declare his intention to become a citizen and then qualify under the election law. We deny men the right to work in certain occupations unless they are citizens, yet we make them wait five years to become citizens, meanwhile failing to provide them with facilities for meeting the educational requirements for citizenship. We tolerate a system of seasonal labor and shifting of the working population which makes it physically impossible for the migratory workman to meet the legal requirements. We permit women to vote and still retain the law that naturalization follows the husband or father—thereby making it possible for the alien woman who marries a citizen or is the child of a naturalized citizen to vote as soon as she complies with the residence law, however ignorant she may be. At the same time we deny the privilege of citizenship to native-born American women who marry aliens. One of the great questions facing us to-day is the adaptation of our citizenship requirements to the needs of the country. We cannot have real Americanization until this is done. A man or woman unfit for citizenship is not wanted in America. The fit man or woman should be in every way encouraged to become the best kind of citizen and to remain so.

We have no standard definitions of the citizenship requirement as to what constitutes knowledge of English, of the constitution, of loyalty, or the meaning of the oath of allegiance. Some judges with a high sense of patriotic duty enforce one standard; others “pass them up”—and again America pays the price in its quality of citizenship and in the kind of service such men and women railroaded into citizenship will render when called upon. We have never considered a knowledge of the country, of its institutions and of Americanism as necessary for citizenship, either of native or foreign born. We rest our case upon a rather splendid series of assumptions. We assume that the school and home and job and town will do this work with never an inquiry by the Federal government as to how the task is being done. Were it not for the campaign for preparedness and the dangers we face we would still accept the public school Fourth of July oration as sufficient evidence of the interest and proficiency of the native-born son; we would still believe that the granting of papers to foreign-born men sealed their loyalty to America. We hardly yet realize the significance of the fact that no specific way of pledging allegiance is required from the men or women who come of age; even the child born here of foreign parents is not asked to make a choice between the two possible allegiances that may be dear to him. Little citizenship training is given in our schools, except in the form of diluted history or civil government, and the thousands of girls and boys that leave school at 14 years of age and go to work do not obtain even that. We assume that the child has absorbed American ideas and traditions. The feeble response to a preparedness call and our attempts at neutrality in thought have shown us how little of the national and how much of the local and selfishly “safe” attitude we as a nation have. What is our conception of citizenship? Does it mean that we, the people, are the possessors of life, liberty, happiness, and prosperity in America with no corresponding obligations? Does it mean that our obligations consist in paying taxes, being law abiding to the point of keeping out of court, and voting at some elections? We owe these obligations to any country in which we are guests. We still find ourselves, after generations of American citizens, debating whether we shall train our young men to defend America. We find the best life in the country not in government service, building a strong nation, but in business, building an individual fortune.

Are we as careless, go as you please, and perfunctory about making aliens into citizens as we are about native sons and daughters growing into citizens? It is not very flattering to America to find that up to the beginning of the war in Europe the greatest incentives to the acquirement of citizenship by aliens were political and commercial. There are many thousands of aliens moved by a general aspiration toward the idealistic privileges and traditions of American citizenship and these make our true patriots. But by far too many of our citizens have entered by way of the political club and at the behest of a self-interested politician; and by way of the job, to earn a living. How and when did citizenship become so cheap and begin to serve the commercial and not the patriotic needs of America?

The chief difficulty arose with the willingness of government to place the whole burden upon the alien. We wrote a law on the statute books, setting forth certain technical requirements; then we taxed the prospective citizen enough to pay for the enforcement of the law, providing a number of fat offices and a neat balance in the treasury. Then we sat back in our comfortable office chairs and said to the alien: Now you comply with the law and we will grant you citizenship papers.

But in drafting the law, we did another thing. We called it raising the standard. What we really did was to increase the technicalities which cost influence and money to satisfy, but which gave America no better citizens. The naturalization law provides that an alien before becoming a citizen shall have a continuous residence of five years in America, shall comply with certain rules, shall have a knowledge of the English language and of the constitution, and shall renounce all allegiance to foreign governments. He may not do this all at once. It is a long, complicated process, intended to safeguard American citizenship, but failing in its purpose because we failed to establish standards or facilities for compliance. For instance, the prospective citizen must file a declaration of intention at least two years prior to the granting of his final papers—an obsolete requirement, as his five years of continuous residence is now established by the filing of a certificate of arrival with his petition. A second document, the petition for citizenship, must be filed not less than two nor more than seven years after the declaration of intention, verified by the affidavits of two credible citizen witnesses, certifying to the petitioner’s five years’ residence in the United States and one year’s residence in the state or district in which the application is made. This latter requirement creates almost insuperable difficulties for migratory laborers who go from state to state, following the call of casual or seasonal labor. After the petition is filed, the applicant must wait at least ninety days before his appearance in court. But should he move during this period from one judicial district to another within the same state, he must file a new petition and pay an additional fee, as the court will not transfer its original records. As a result, an applicant who removes to New York City after filing a petition and paying the fee in Buffalo must go through the same process in New York City. And unless he can afford to bring his witnesses twice from Buffalo to New York City he must wait another year until two other citizens can verify his year’s residence in New York City. The two witnesses must accompany the petitioner at least twice—when the petition is filed and at the hearing in open court. If his case is not reached and adjournments are made, the applicant frequently appears not only the minimum four times, but may appear as many as six or eight times, and his witnesses as many as four or five times. Every day in court means the loss of wages and the cost of transportation to and from the county seat for himself and witnesses whom he must reimburse for their losses. The applicant and his witnesses are in constant fear that their enforced presence in court during ordinary working hours may result in the loss of their jobs.

Of what possible value can state and district lines be in a national citizenship matter? Are we a nation or are we a conglomeration of states and districts? If we need so cumbersome a machine to prevent frauds, by which the alien pays the entire cost, then the reduction in fraud is at the high cost of citizens. It is estimated that 10 per cent of all aliens who try to become citizens fail in their final examination because of technicalities, and most of them never come back, though no fraud was alleged.

When we set this highly specialized Federal machinery in motion in 1906, it was on the theory that citizenship was a national, not a state matter. In 1889 when the enforcement of the immigration laws was transferred to the Federal government, it acquired all powers of admission and exclusion, but all the protective features of the Board of Emigration Commissioners of New York state were dropped and a series of exploitations immediately arose. This is precisely what happened when our naturalization laws were transferred. We took the authority, but we neglected to establish standards, facilities, and protection for the alien. We did not settle the states’-rights question and we did not consider sufficiently our international relations.

In the matter of standards, the burden of determining the qualifications of the prospective citizens rests upon the Bureau of Naturalization, while the actual granting of final papers rests with some 2380 judges, each applying his own idea of qualifications. The Bureau of Naturalization up to 1915 has been primarily concerned with technicalities of law and proof of residence, time elapsing between the granting of papers, etc. It has been largely legal evidence which has been placed before the judge, showing that the law had been complied with.

For nine long years the Federal government enforced the letter of this law—it had no American spirit in it. It did nothing to assist the alien to qualify in the English language or in civics. It made no attempt to stimulate the opening of night schools where these could be taught; it favored no educational extension work; it saw no connection between the courts, schools, and naturalization bureaus. Then things began to happen. States like New York and California started immigration bureaus which emphasized education. Other states like New Jersey and Massachusetts had immigration commissions that studied naturalization among other things. Two cities, at least, took up the matter—Cleveland and Los Angeles—of connecting the public schools with the courts and having the certificate of the school, giving credit for work in the English language and civics, recognized by the judge in granting final papers. In a few cities night sessions were also urged, so the cost to workers in time and wages might be lessened. In 1914 the Bureau of Education established a division of immigrant education, which began a nation-wide campaign of education through the public schools. In 1915, the preparedness movement, and the discussion of hyphenated Americans and their activities, awakened the Bureau of Naturalization to the fact that a new situation confronted America.

In the meantime politics and business had been as busy as ever “making citizens” for their own purposes, putting them through the courts without qualification in English or civics. Something had to be done about this, so the Bureau of Naturalization reversed its policy and is now conducting a campaign by which the name of every applicant for first papers is now sent to the nearest school authority and the alien is followed up and urged to become qualified for citizenship.

This is still largely an ideal and a dream—something to be worked out with infinite care and patience to bring good results. We shall never have prepared citizens until we have Federal aid to local communities. Outside of the large cities the local school can barely meet its local obligations to children, and it will be a long time before there are adequate facilities for night schools. This is by no means all of the problem of standards. I am convinced that we shall have to have a Federal admission law compelling the acquirement of the English language or similar compulsory state laws to get immigrants into the school. Let us tell the truth. We have empty night schools in America as well as aliens without school facilities. Why? The foreign governments and the bulk of the foreign-language newspapers are against the immigrant learning the English language. It opens the door too rapidly to Americanization. The short-sighted business man is against his workmen becoming literate, learning English and too much about America. He thinks they will move up and want higher wages. The trade union is against it, as it also thinks they will move up and displace union men. No school can succeed where the employer discourages attendance, works his men nights or overtime, interfering with attendance, or in alternate weekly shifts, destroying continuity of attendance. The coöperation of business and the adjustment of the school system for adults to the industrial system are vital to success. No school can fully succeed that does not have the support and understanding of the local political and religious leaders, as they may make for or against attendance. A national governmental plan of preparation for citizenship depends in its last analysis upon local activity, sympathy, and understanding, and upon adequate funds. Why did Detroit double its appropriation for night schools in 1915 and increase its attendance 156 per cent? Because organized business, wide awake and far seeing, saw that the stable working population in the future in America will be men with a citizenship and a home stake in America. They set out to provide it, and the latest step taken is that of the Packard Motor Car Company, basing advancement upon citizenship.

Citizenship preparation cannot be a paper propaganda—it must bear a vital relation to the work, play, and living conditions of each citizen and take him not only to the school but to the military training camp; not only to the job but to the polls; not only to better conditions in America but to unswerving loyalty to America.

So much for standards. What have we done about states’ rights? In the chapter on the American Vote, I have dealt with the confusion between our state and Federal voting laws. We have a more serious problem in the economic imprint we have permitted states and cities to put upon citizenship. As a result of these laws citizenship has become in many states a kind of economic patchwork. In order to preserve certain rights, advantages, and fields of effort to native-born and naturalized citizens, we have made certain discriminations against aliens which have resulted in a purely commercial incentive to citizenship or evasions of law.

As illustrative of America’s attitude in these matters, let us take public service. Aliens are shut out from public service by several laws and many municipal ordinances. The state laws are sometimes very sweeping, excluding the alien from employment in any capacity in any department of the state. In California, for instance, only citizens may be employed in any department of the state, county, city, or town. This law was invoked last winter to prevent the payment of salaries of several Canadians who had been employed as teachers in the public schools. This law was later amended, allowing aliens who had made their declaration of intention to be employed as teachers and exempting the University of California from the operation of the act.

State civil service laws prescribe citizenship as a qualification in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. The Federal civil service law has a similar requirement. In most states these laws apply to unskilled labor on public improvements, road building and ditch digging, even where sublet by the city to a contractor. The result is a wholesale evasion of the law, made necessary in order for the city to get its work done. The alien knows he is a law breaker and gets his first lesson in American law enforcement. He works in peace and security while some one else pays the necessary fines. If the worst happens, he applies for his first papers and then works under an injunction until the law can be interpreted or amended—which is done if labor is very scarce.

It is a sound policy necessary for the protection of the country to require that only citizens shall administer its government and hold positions of trust and responsibility. As a measure of defense, which is its main justification, it should be national. It is no defense against a foreign foe to have it obtain in one state and not in another; in one city and not in another. A state or city that needs protection from a neighboring state or city has not yet attained a national point of view and stands in the way of Americanism and nationalism. It is sound to keep alien workmen off our waterways and water-supply systems and other public works of importance in defense, but we defeat our entire purpose of safety when any alien resident here for a few months can go on those arteries of our defense system with a declaration of intention in his pocket.

It is a sound policy that the instruction in our public schools should be by American citizens with an American point of view and loyalty, but compliance with that law, as in California, by granting first papers, will not carry out that policy or give assurance of teaching from the American point of view. Americans regard the possession of a paper as evidence of intent and of qualifications, whereas it is generally regarded by the alien as a technical requirement necessary to earn money in America.

In some states there is a modified form of this law, requiring that preference be given to citizens. At this stage it becomes clear that these laws are not national defense laws, but labor preference laws. If Americanism means anything in justice, law, order, or opportunity, such laws should have their purpose expressed and their terms defined in the Federal statutes and due notice should be given the alien before he emigrates to America. Are we a nation dealing squarely with all peoples and honorably with those we admit, or are we a federation of states each dealing with the alien as it sees fit, after the nation has admitted him? All right-thinking Americans must see that we must deal as a nation and not locally with the subjects of alienism and citizenship.

Local temporizing with national honor and fair play has led us into even more unjust discriminations, indefensible in the light of our treaty obligations. Aliens are in some states excluded from pursuing certain private callings. In many states an alien may not be an attorney; in other states that profession is open to declarants, showing again our utter lack of comprehension of such laws as defense measures. For example, in Louisiana, an alien cannot get a contract for public printing; in Michigan he cannot get a barber’s license; in many states, such as New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Vermont, etc., only a citizen can get a liquor license. In six states the alien is excluded from gaining a livelihood by hunting and fishing; in Tennessee he may not be a market hunter, and in Wyoming he may not be a guide. In Virginia only a citizen may get a junk-dealer’s license, and in Georgia only a citizen or a declarant can get a peddler’s license. In New Jersey an alien cannot get a license to transmit money to foreign countries, or receive money on deposit for transmission to foreign countries, or buy and sell foreign money.

What is the situation in relation to property? The United States consists of a federation of states, each sovereign in its own domain except for the powers delegated to the Federal government. The tenure of real property is not one of the powers so delegated. Each state consequently has sovereign power over its own soil, and can determine by whom it will permit its soil to be held and what conditions it will attach to the tenure. For this reason the state enactments regarding real property are of the utmost importance. In twenty-nine states resident aliens are given the same property rights as citizens; in two other states the same rights are given to white aliens.

In other states, however, aliens are practically prohibited from holding land at all or may hold it only for a limited period. In still others, no alien can acquire land, except by inheritance or in payment of debt. The laws vary greatly in the various states. Non-resident alien heirs are placed in a difficult position. In several states they are allowed to take only with the limitation that they sell within a certain time. If land in California falls to an alien not capable of taking title to it, it is sold for his benefit; in Illinois non-resident heirs are excluded altogether.

The restriction of landholding to citizens is a fundamentally sound measure of national defense. It is not sound unless it is uniform in all states, and in view of our growing international importance and impossibility of isolation from the world, there should be a national policy in this regard wholly governed by international agreement and national law. The holding of land also bears a vital relation to our various schemes for colonizing aliens, opening of reservations, and issuing of rural credits, and should be considered in these connections.

Some of the recent so-called insurance laws show the same tendencies to discriminations. The workmen’s compensation laws now in force in the United States affect the alien in several ways. The most evident is the discrimination against alien beneficiaries that limit the amount that may be paid to non-resident dependents. Connecticut gives such a dependent only half of what a resident would receive, and Kansas names $750 as the maximum a non-resident may receive, although a resident may receive a sum varying from $1200 to $3600. In some states installments are commuted to a lump sum if paid to a non-resident, and in Nebraska this may amount to only two thirds of the sum total of the installments; in New York it may amount to only one half, while lump-sum payments by the railroads engaged in interstate commerce may amount only to one year’s wages.

Another form of discrimination is found in the determination of who are “dependents.” Three states in the case of non-resident aliens limit to the closest relationships those who may be considered dependents. Three others present the extreme situation of refusing to recognize non-resident alien dependents at all. If an immigrant workman is killed in any one of these states, even his closest relatives in Austria or Italy have no standing under this law.

Aliens are excluded in Illinois and New York from the benefits of the mothers’ pension laws; and there is a tendency to make citizenship a requirement in plans proposed or put into operation for the welfare of the unemployed. In the law passed in Idaho last year, requiring the county commissioners to provide work on the public highways or elsewhere for unemployed men, only citizens of the United States were entitled to apply for work. In other words if two men contribute equally to producing wealth for the state, the citizen may work and receive state funds to keep him from starving, while the alien must get out or starve. The state is done with him, when it has no work for him to do.

In other states an alien cannot be an executor, administrator, or guardian, a provision which often hampers the settlement of the estate of an alien whose close friends and relatives are often aliens. There are other examples of discrimination in the enjoyment of personal rights and privileges. In Pennsylvania and New Jersey an alien is not allowed to have a rifle or shotgun in his possession—nominally in order that game may be protected. A law that went into effect this summer in Pennsylvania goes even further; it prohibits an alien from owning or having in his possession any kind of dog. The constitutionality of this law is soon to be tested.

One cannot read the hundreds of discriminating laws without a sense of the utter prostitution of American citizenship to prejudice, race hatred, greed, cupidity, and to the selfishness of groups and individuals. Men in power set themselves above the nation and seek to make that power secure by controlling at will the means of subsistence of other men. By all means let us have a complete national defense in which the lives, land, and jobs of citizens shall be secured, but let us have it by statesmanship and national law and international agreement, so we may fight in the open for what we believe in and not support indefensible citizenship legislation lobbied through the legislatures by class interests.

And now we face a new situation which bids fair to upset all our citizenship plans. Some industries are taking the stand that they will only promote men who are citizens or who have applied for their first papers. In this attitude employers are moved by two considerations—patriotism and the need for national preparedness and a realization of their responsibility; and second, the need for an improved and more stable labor supply and a reduction in accidents among English-speaking men. The Packard Motor Car Company in making its announcement said:

“We have in our organization almost 100 different peoples. We have Germans, Italians, Austrians, French, Polish—whose sympathies are divided as regards the war at present raging in Europe. We have a babel of tongues and an endless variety of races and nationalities.

“Our workmen are divided into cliques thereby. Their sympathies are with the lands that gave them birth. They forget our national ideals. To my mind this is a source of danger not only to the company, but to the whole country. The conditions of the average American factory are the conditions of this country. We have no unified people, as in France, in Germany, or in other countries.

“In the American factory this sympathy and patriotism of each set of foreign-born workmen for their native land causes friction among the men. We find that in many instances men of one nationality object to working under a foreman or higher official of another nationality. We have had letters from the men along that line objecting to employment under a boss who is undesirable because of a different nationality.

“So we are going to make the ‘bosses’ in this factory Americans. Be they of whatever nationality when they come in as laborers, they must be American citizens, loyal to America and American ideals and all they stand for, before they can hope for positions of responsibility and trust. We determined to make the prerequisite of success in this institution American patriotism and American nationalism.

“We will employ foreign-born men, but it shall be understood that their only hope for advancement and preferment lies in their speedy adoption of American citizenship and the forswearing of allegiance to other lands. And we feel that if throughout this nation commercial and industrial success depended on a prerequisite of American loyalty and patriotism, the country would be better off, its factories would have far more efficiency and the workmen would be better satisfied and happier, with old-country feuds and bickerings forgotten and superseded by a thorough Americanism.”

As an educational measure supplying the stimulus to citizenship work this is valuable. Should it be adopted, however, as a widespread industrial policy it will lead to two complications—international, as being unduly discriminating, and hardships to the alien, due to lack of advance knowledge and opportunity to adjust himself. It may further cheapen citizenship by putting it on a commercial basis. The way out is to notify each alien before admission that every alien over school age and under 45 will be required to learn English within five years, subject to deportation for non-compliance, if facilities are furnished him. We shall then see every industry interested in keeping a good labor supply, making every effort to comply with the law, and we will have a national policy based on law instead of isolated action by miscellaneous industries, never uniform and varying widely in purpose and methods.

We have heard much about “dual citizenship” since the European war began. This is not a new question. Over and over again it has come up for adjudication before the Department of State. There are two important aspects of the subject. The first concerns the question of the citizenship of children born in the United States of foreign-born parents; the second concerns the status of naturalized American citizens.

In the first case the difficulty arises from what appears to be an inevitable conflict of laws. There are two theories for determining the nationality, or rather the citizenship, of any given individual. The first of these laws is what is called the jus soli, or the law of the land. According to this a person takes the nationality of the land in which he is born. This is the American conception running through our general theory of citizenship.

The other is called jus sanguinis, or the law of blood. This is the law that is followed in ordinary European civil law codes. According to this law, a person’s nationality or citizenship depends on the citizenship of his parents. The United States has adopted this rule in the case of children born abroad of parents that are American citizens. Each law has its advantages. It is certainly better to consider that the child of an American business man residing in China at the time the child is born is an American citizen than it would be to consider that the child was a subject of the Chinese Empire. This law of blood, like many other rules of the civil law, goes back to such a fundamental human instinct that any other way of dealing with this situation than the one it suggests would seem wrong to us. The law of the land, on the other hand, has very distinct advantages as well, which can also be illustrated from our American situation. A Russian man and woman, let us say, succeed in escaping persecution at home and come to this country to live. We prefer to think that their children, born on American soil and brought up under American institutions, are Americans, and we have made this the cardinal principle of American citizenship. It would be too late now to attempt to alter this law, even if we wished to do so, because it is firmly rooted both in statute law and in our fundamental conception of the meaning of America.

And yet we find it convenient and right to use the opposed law of nationality, the law of blood, in such a case as a child born in China of American parents. If we find it necessary to adopt into our own statutes a provision so contrary to our general citizenship law as this law of blood, we cannot consistently object when another country adopts it as its principle of citizenship. The difficulty has been met hitherto by allowing the child to choose which nationality it wishes to keep when it becomes twenty-one, or attains its majority, and by holding it subject until that time to the law of whichever country it happens to be in. This at least is the way the situation works out, although there has never been any international ruling on the subject. If the child were in France, the French authorities applied the French law; if it were in America, the American authorities applied the American law, and when the child became of age, it made its election, and thereafter was held to be a citizen of whichever country it elected. It was considered to be so clear a fact that this election was something that the child alone could do, that the fact that the father took the child from one country to another was held over and over again not to affect the child’s right to chose for itself when it became of age. Theoretically we hold that there can be no dual citizenship of the naturalized citizen or of the child born in America if he elects American citizenship. The records are not altogether clear if we stand ready to enforce this. There are two recent cases on this point. In June, 1915, a young man named Ugo da Prato, who was born in Boston in 1895 and had gone to Italy in 1912 to study architecture, was held by the Italian government as liable to military duty because his father, Antonio da Prato, had been a native of Italy. He had emigrated to America and had been naturalized in Boston in 1892. Under our American law, the son Ugo, born on American soil, was an American. The Italian law, however, holds that Italian subjects who have acquired citizenship in other countries are not exempted from the obligations of military service, nor from the penalties imposed on those who bear arms against their country. Italy subsequently released Ugo da Prato.

A similar situation arose in the case of one de Long, of Louisiana, who was born in America of a French father who had never been naturalized. Upon his inquiry to the State Department as to what his status would be in France if he were to return there during the war, the State Department advised him that while he was by the law of America an American citizen, by the law of France he was a French citizen, and they declined to encourage him to test the matter by returning to France while the war was in progress.

The real question at issue, of course, is whether or not a nation has the right to regard its control over its subject as a thing of which it can refuse to divest itself. The Ottoman law is that no transfer of allegiance to which the consent of the Ottoman government has not been previously obtained is binding. The French law is similar; the French government rarely consents to permit a Frenchman of military age to throw off his allegiance. Under certain conditions, however, permission may be obtained. The Greek government generally refuses to recognize a change of nationality made without consent. Neither does the Persian government, nor the Russian government. Under Russian law, a Russian subject who becomes a citizen of another country without the consent of the Russian government is deemed to have committed an offense for which he is liable to arrest and punishment if he returns without having previously obtained permission of the Russian government.

This second form of dual allegiance, which would more properly be stated as the attempt to hold that the change of allegiance either did not take place at all or else was not thoroughgoing, bears in itself the possibility of very serious complications. Our naturalized citizens and the native-born children of foreign-born parents have a right to determine that the allegiance they have chosen to swear to the United States be protected.

The situation at present amounts to this: The United States has treaties of naturalization with Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Denmark, the German States, Great Britain, Haiti, Norway and Sweden, and Portugal. These treaties provide under what conditions naturalization does not free a former subject from obligation to the country of his birth. Theoretically, whenever a question involving some aspect of naturalization comes up with reference to a former subject of one of these countries, his rights and obligations are determined by the treaty. As a matter of fact, however, this is not always the case, for while there is a treaty of naturalization with Germany, that did not prevent the Germans from passing the law of nationality of June 1, 1914, which practically nullifies the treaty. Where there is no treaty of naturalization all that the state authorities can do is to call the attention of the foreign government to the American point of view. It has never, apparently, been considered possible to enforce the American conception of naturalization, or to make American citizenship really respected in countries that are slow to do so. When the point was brought to an issue with Russia, the only effect was to leave us without any treaty with Russia at all.

As long as we are content to treat naturalization as an isolated matter we will get no satisfaction. We shall never be in a better position than at the close of the war to insist upon a thorough understanding of matters and adoption of a uniform practice in international citizenship. We now have citizenship matters to settle nationally and internationally for which we are ill prepared.

Congress is charged by the Constitution with “establishing a uniform rule of naturalization.” It has never been established. It is the immediate duty of Congress to do so. We need a thorough overhauling of our Federal naturalization laws, and of local laws in regard to voting, holding land and property, earning a living, etc., from the standpoint of national development and defense, and from the standpoint of the future of our Americanism. We cannot do this without a thorough, impartial scientific study of the effect of the enforcement of these laws—not only as shown in official statistics and records in Washington, but in the local districts and among those naturalized. We need to know more of the cost and effectiveness of our naturalization process and the kind of citizens it gives us. We need to know about the granting of papers through the various courts and the influences at work for making good or bad citizens throughout the country. We need to know what our facilities are for educating aliens to become citizens, and more of the attitude of our newly naturalized citizens toward America. Having these matters in hand, we may then proceed to work out a citizenship policy and practice which will accord with the times in which we live and will be a national and international code which will make all native-born citizens doubly proud of their heritage and all foreign-born citizens proud to live or die for America, as the call may come.

CHAPTER V
The Popular Vote

We are facing a national election in which the “vote of the people” will decide the future of America more certainly than at any election since the Civil War. One of the most vital questions before us this year is: Will the foreign-born vote tend to solidarity and be cast in racial interests, or will it be cast for America along broad lines of national policy? Will the 1500 foreign-language newspapers influence the foreign-born vote in favor of a national policy or will it attempt to influence it along racial lines?

The returns of the next national election should have an important bearing upon our future immigration policy of admission. Should we find the vote tending to solidify along racial lines then we have an additional reason for insisting upon the development of an assimilation policy if we are to continue to admit aliens. The racial vote may prove to be a far more anti-American influence than the foreign colony. America cannot afford to have an Irish vote, a German-American vote, a Jewish vote, cast en bloc for any measures or man, if Americanism as defined in the Declaration of Independence and Federal Constitution is to prevail.

The issues promise to center more about candidates than platforms. Parties will impress us more as election machinery than as vehicles of any really fundamental ideals and program. We shall probably have three measures of preparedness from which to choose. There will be a sincere, genuine program of preparedness, including international duty, Americanism, and preparation at home carried by the Republicans, to fit its candidate, and probably indorsed by the Progressives. There will be a milder course, a kind of middle-of-the-road preparedness carried by the Democrats, in the hope of holding their own. The indications are now that there will be a third party of pacifists, anti-preparedness at most points, which will include the ultra-contented, the discontented, and a considerable socialist and labor following. Each platform will doubtless carry some planks dealing with “pressing national questions” as ballast, but few voters will consider them seriously. The main issue of preparedness will determine the lines of the vote, because America now knows that all of its internal progress and “reform” depend upon an America that can defend itself. Belgium drove that lesson home. Through the intricate paths of American honor, international duty, adequate preparedness, national service, universal training, Mexican strategy, the American voter must wend his way. He will be beset at every turn by the “record of the administration and of Congress,” interpreted first one way and then another by the propaganda of defense organizations and of their opponents. He will be deluged with accurate and inaccurate information, from which he will find it difficult to select the best. He will be bombarded with literature, and enticed to meetings and will be given promises hard to keep in 1917. Within the next few months he will receive more gratuitous condensed education on all these questions than during the entire time since 1912.

In addition to all this confusion of mind and competitive struggle, prevailing about the native-born voter, the foreign-born voter will be torn by loyalties and sympathies which go back many generations to the fatherland. Most of them have some one dear to them at the front or lying dead on some battle field. Their mail is censored and they often do not know who is dead and who is living or what has happened to their little homestead in the old country. They see ammunition going out of America, not to fight their battles, but to kill some of their countrymen. They see America growing rich from this manufacture. They are only waiting the first assurance of peace to go back and see what has happened or to help their home country.

It is inevitable that some expression of this should find voice at the polls, and the question is how to make the American issues so fine and big and strong and world compelling that they will engulf this great human sorrow and devotion and make it of service to America. How can we in this next election make every voter feel that America is for him—to serve, to guard, to use, so we may stem the great tide of discontent, aversion, and desertion which has set in among our foreign-born voters? How can we in this coming election remove the indifference, irresponsibility, and profit seeking which characterizes our native-born voter?

Now that we face the crisis and know the necessity, we look with amazement and alarm at what our preparation has been. We turn to our schools and ask them what they have been doing in the way of preparing the voter—what has he been taught about America and its government, institutions, and opportunities? How have these been related to his own local civic life? What sense of national service has he acquired in his town school? Alas—we find there is nothing held so cheap as the American vote, and the last form of preparedness is that for voting. Of the American boy we require that he shall be born here, and shall be 21 years of age. We assume that somehow the public school, which he is required to attend in some states only, will teach him the value of the vote and how to use it, and something of his duties and obligations to his country. We also assume that the boy’s parents will educate him along these lines. To the girl in most states we deny the vote for apparently no reasons other than precedent, prejudice, conjecture, or apprehension.

There is no ceremony, no pledge of allegiance, no occasion made patriotically memorable in the mind of the boy when he casts his first vote. No one makes him welcome as a citizen of the country. He registers in his home town in an automatic way, and if he thinks of voting in the future as an obnoxious duty that interferes with his business or week ends, it is surely not entirely his own fault.

In some schools there is an increasing attempt to bring his rather localized experience into relation to the broader questions of the day, and into the national political life, but the mass of boys depend upon the newspapers and such discussion as they stimulate or hear among their fellows. This is good so far as it goes, but it is too critical, too superficial, too opinionated, too provincial to serve the great national need of America in the crucial test of elections. Despite our many thousands of educational organizations it is very difficult to obtain an impartial and scientific statement on any political controversy. There are many briefs for one side or the other, but few impartial statements that are not special pleading.

The indifference and ignorance of the native-born voter are real impediments to Americanism. A vote is a practical thing requiring as much knowledge and experience in its use as any other responsible act of life. You cannot teach a man to handle a gun by a series of lectures on the ethics of warfare. Neither can you teach a man to handle a vote by the average treatise on civil government.

In our failure to find this training in the public school, we turn next to the political school, the club, the district organization. Here we find every mechanism possible for getting the vote and holding it, but practically none for training or instructing that vote. It is easy to find a dozen men to help a prospective voter to obtain his citizenship papers, but very difficult to find one man or an institution to educate him in Americanism and English, enabling him to qualify. It is easy to find men who condemn the sinking of the Lusitania and watchful waiting in Mexico, but hard to find a man who has a clear, practical idea of how he will register that protest in November. Thousands will vote for Mr. Roosevelt as their protest in case he is nominated. But suppose Mr. Roosevelt is not nominated. Have they thought of their next effective protest at the polls? Justice Hughes perhaps. But who knows where he stands on these questions? Those of us who have worked with him as governor of New York, and knew him, take no risks, but how about the average voter who has no such knowledge and must make up his own mind?

As shown in the preceding chapter the acquiring of citizenship by aliens does not have for its main object the vote. To him, it is connected more closely with a job, with getting on in America, with freedom from the tyranny of his own country and from military service, and with gain. The power of the vote is, generally speaking, an unknown quantity to him, until he has been here some time—often it represents something which he can sell, or which he has to have to keep his job—ideals set before him by some native American. It is a rather curious thing that the padrone system had its real origin in our political rather than in our industrial system. The padrone is a labor boss who furnishes men to industrial organizations, and in return for keeping up the supply of men, has the privilege of housing and feeding them—making his profit from the employment fees, housing, and supplies. The padrone, however, is usually a political leader, not in the camp or quarry or mine where the industry is located, but in the city, which is the source of the supply of men. It was generally understood that the padrone, in return for the contract to furnish men, would deliver the foreign-born vote in his district in favor of the candidate acceptable to the company with whom he had contracted. He saw to it that his countrymen were naturalized and how they voted. In this way the position of the padrone became impregnable.

If a community as a whole fails to use the immigrant as a political and citizenship asset, some other force in the community is fairly sure to awaken to his political usefulness. The only way in which a community can “control” its alien vote is by controlling preparation for citizenship. Most communities, far from controlling it, have not yet developed interest in it. The American community, without night schools, without interest, without responsibility for the Americanism of one third or one half of its residents, is the real parent of this “alien” vote.

The ignorance of the newly naturalized voter is different from that of the American. But like the indifference and ignorance of the American voter, the ignorance of the foreign voter is largely a social matter, and is subject to the same remedies. In other words, it is not merely instruction in English and Civics, the usual preparation for citizenship, that makes an immigrant a good voter or a bad one. A very great deal depends upon his social background, upon the understanding and point of view he has been able to develop as a result of his contacts with American institutions and American community life. To develop a social understanding large enough and deep enough to make a man grasp readily a national political issue in all its importance, and the subtler aspects of community issues and legislation, when they come up to the vote, is a tremendous task—not a task that even a very intelligent and educated immigrant can compass for himself. This, in a political sense, is the heart of our present difficulty with the naturalized voter. His social assimilation has not been sufficiently thorough to give him the background he needs at the polls or to enable him to find himself among the various political parties and sub-parties.

Now, the average voter is too thoroughly localized. In other words, his political status in America is very much like his social status. He becomes fixed in a neighborhood, a colony, a ward, and he never learns to think of himself nationally. Politically, the issues are presented to him in the impersonation of local figures and interests—Max Schroeder at the corner saloon, or Tim Connolly of the Labor Council. National issues are invariably translated in ward terms and the immigrant accepts them at this valuation. After this kind of political tradition has persisted for a few generations the result is a community or colony of hopelessly provincial voters, keenly alive to the immediate practical profit or loss involved in any political issue, almost oblivious of the fact that the greatest good to the greatest number is the thing for which the citizen of a Republic is to vote if he is to fulfill his republicanism.

The social education of Americans is difficult enough. We need to Americanize the American voter quite as much as the foreign. But with the immigrant the problem of social education as a prerequisite to political freedom and competence is a far more difficult thing. The truth is that nobody can coach him in American life. He needs to live it and must be allowed to do so, if we are to have competent voters. In proportion to the breadth of his human contacts, and to the number and variety of American institutions which he touches he will be informed upon those subjects and points of view that fit him for the actual exercise of the vote.

This is a social responsibility on the part of America toward its foreign-born citizens. It does not belong to the courts, or, to any great degree, to the schools. These two agencies are to see to it that the candidate for naturalization knows and can use the English language, is of good moral character, and is “attached to the principles of the Constitution.” But at the best, the preparation for and the process of naturalization alone does not Americanize, does not qualify a man for the American vote in nation, state, or city.

With some sense of this, the schools that prepare for citizenship have within the last year been revising their courses in “civics” for aliens. They have put aside the paraphrases of the Constitution which have been the traditional textbooks for these classes and they have evolved a system of “community civics” designed to teach the alien his privileges and responsibilities in their simplest form, with direct reference to his everyday life and his own immediate points of contact with the laws of public health, of property, of parents’ obligations, etc.

This is a much-needed movement. But it should be accompanied by some organized effort to make the immigrant voters of this country an entirely intelligent political force. I am referring of course to the great body of adult immigrants who have attained most of their education in this country, outside of work hours. It would be invidious to suggest that certain of our immigrant voters need any assistance whatever for intelligent voting.

How can we best put the newly naturalized immigrant, alert, well-intentioned, but usually socially and politically unassimilated, in touch with the political issues of the day in their large national bearings, and in their practical expression.

I should like to see the political forum, in its best form, become a recognized part of American life. It is needed for the native born. It is practically indispensable for the foreign born. It would not be non-partisan, nor attempt to be. The forums would be conducted by the parties separately, but always openly, regularly, as a routine of community series of meetings for discussion and information. And the party that did its educational work best, and placed its ideas and objects most frankly in the light, would in the long run get the votes. But it would have to be a sustained piece of work, carried on from year to year, with quite as much zeal and quite as much sustained party support after elections as before. The most significant effort made in this direction was tried by the Progressive Party through its Progressive Service.[1] This educational division carried on political educational work throughout the country and drafted legislation, though it was not in office nor directly responsible to the people for its enactment. It failed temporarily because the average voter does not yet respond to national issues in the absence of danger and conflict; of controversy and emergency. He has been too long taught that he can learn all he needs to know at election time. This attempt to realize an ideal ahead of its time has suffered defeat but temporarily. So long as the party system prevails there will exist a need for political education by parties. How long it will be before leaders are freed from the spoils system and recognize this obligation cannot be foretold.

[1] “A New Spirit in Party Organization.” The North American Review, June, 1914.

Athens feared that if the town hall grew too small to hold a convocation of the people, Hellenic democracy would perish from the earth. Here in America we cannot revert to the town meeting. But in the interests of Americanism, I believe the political parties of this country will be forced, by the developing intelligence of public sentiment, to create systems of party education which will have to bear the light of day—and the challenge of severe competition. Party education now means campaign literature, speeches only by candidates or for them, a virulent emotionalism which even the unsophisticated voter no longer takes seriously. A party “stands firm” for “social and industrial justice” for all men and women alike. But these same men and women, who do not attend conventions, who are sorely in need of social and industrial justice or who would like to help in securing it for others, never learn what its concrete definition is, or how to secure it through the vote. Our political parties need, first of all, great leaders. And after the great leaders we need an informed and alert and sensitive citizen body, insistent for information, undismayed by long ballot sheets, at home among political ideas. We need party laboratories, publicists not advertisers, a thoroughgoing machinery for getting studies and facts and opinions to people in a form in which they can weigh and use them.

The very introduction of the word “political” revives the conventional fear that the immigrant will be “used” in dark and dangerous ways. It is certainly true that he has been. But what America really needs to face with greater apprehension is the immigrant that is not used. The time has passed for a negative position. How is the political force of the foreign-born residents and citizens to be intelligently and practically connected with the body politic? It is folly to let our fear of the word “political” justify our gross neglect of the political intelligence and potential power of from one third to one half the population of many of our important cities and towns. The use of the immigrant politically is more likely than anything else to put an end to the political abuse of him.

Many Americans have taken some satisfaction during late years in attributing radical votes and platforms to the foreign born. And yet in the last presidential election Ohio, with a population of about half that of New York, and with a native-born percentage of 87.4 as against New York’s 69.8, cast 27,000 more votes for the Socialist candidate. In that election, New York state, with a foreign-born population of 30 per cent, gave the Socialist candidate a vote amounting to seven tenths of one per cent of its total population. In the same year Kansas, with a foreign-born population of 8 per cent, gave the Socialist candidate a vote amounting to seven tenths of one per cent of its total population, or twice the New York Socialist vote. Oklahoma, with a native-born population of 97.6 per cent, cast a Socialist vote amounting to 2¹⁄₂ per cent of its population, or nearly four times the ratio for New York, nearly twice the ratio for Illinois, where the foreign born are one fifth of the population, and two and one half times the ratio for Pennsylvania, where the foreign-born population is almost one fifth of the total.

One of the most dangerous conditions—at least potentially—concerning the alien vote we have deliberately brought upon ourselves. In ten states of the Union we have been for years allowing immigrants to vote upon their first papers. In the last presidential election declarants voted in Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, South Dakota, Texas, Oregon, and Wisconsin. The result has been shameless grafting and fraud. In Nebraska the alien in order to vote need only have been in the state six months, and have made his declaration thirty days before election. In other words, an Italian or Russian or Pole or Armenian or Turk who landed at Ellis Island about six months before the last presidential election—say in April, 1912—and who went out to Nebraska at once and lived there until fall, making his declaration in October, could have voted at the last presidential election; and this absolutely without reference to whether he knew a word of English, understood a single provision of the Constitution, or knew even the name of the political party with which he was voting.

The one great fact that stands out is this: That the voting quality of a number of our states is not and never has been subject to review, from the point of view of national political ideals, of Americanism. So long as we have citizens of states that vote who are not citizens of the nation, we have a disrupting force in our national political organization. Citizenship in the United States is constitutionally defined in Amendment 14 thus: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States, and of the states in which they reside.” No other kind of citizenship is provided for in the Constitution. A state may need voters, and undoubtedly many of the first-paper men, pioneers in our western states, have voted wisely and well, with a grasp of local conditions. But because of the greater variety in our present immigration as compared with that of former years, and because American citizenship, including the power to vote, is a matter for national valuation, a state should no more arrogate unto itself the power to make its own citizens than to coin its own money or set up its own postal system. The time has come for conscious statesmanship, for international purposeful dealing with this fundamental element in our political organization.

A situation quite as much in need of national review concerns the relation of women to citizenship. An immigrant woman, no matter what her educational qualifications or length of residence in this country, becomes a citizen by the act of her husband or father’s naturalization. This means in eleven states of the Union that she can vote at all elections. But immigrant women are very generally years behind the men in Americanization. They lack not only the social assimilation which makes them fit to vote, but even the technical requirements for citizenship, which their husbands or fathers have at least mastered. And yet of 3,723,971 possible women voters in the suffrage states, 902,129 are foreign born—one quarter of the whole number. Of late a number of our western suffragist leaders have assured us that the immigrant woman makes a good voter—that she is conscientious about going to the polls, and seems to take a direct and personal interest in registering her opinion on matters that she knows to affect the welfare of her home, her husband, her children. But there are many thousands of immigrant women in this country who have not mastered the English language in even a small degree, who have had no opportunity to learn our civic ideals, whose homes are not American homes. The thing that concerns us is not that this vote of immigrant women will corrupt our political situation. It is rather to lament that so much civic force and interest, of inestimable value in political rating, is lost to the community and to the nation.

We must know and direct the political forces, or we shall direct the social and civic forces in vain. “Civic consciousness” is coming to be too diluted a quantity, too general, too philosophic, too “broad” and non-partisan to act promptly or definitely. It stands for too much, directs too little. The civic welfare of towns has become separate from their political welfare. And the real danger of the salutary modern social and civic movements that are spreading through our cities and towns is that it tends to become so. Most American towns, as such, never think of their immigrants, representing one third or one half of the town in numbers, as voters or as potential voters—or make any effort to bring their force into play in any national way, as a part of public sentiment. They are left to the by-ways of politics. And it is small wonder if they learn the habit and tricks of the by-ways.

Hundreds of immigrants in small towns to-day are getting their political education from just two sources: the ward boss, who tells them no more than he thinks they need to know; and the foreign language newspaper, which is published in the big city and circulated in hundreds of small towns over a wide radius. There are at least 1500 such papers in the country, reaching more than 9,000,000 regular readers daily. Many of them have an acknowledged political interest and trend—witness the vigor of the campaign editorials now beginning to appear with such calculated timeliness. Many of the editors of these papers regard it as their first charge to instruct their fellow countrymen in the political events and tendencies and issues of America. But a very great many of these editors are themselves not initiated in these things. The force that guides the immigrant to the polls must come more directly and warmly from the American center of American affairs.

The American attitude of indifference to the vote, of refusal to consider it a national privilege and a national service, is at bottom responsible for our difficulties with the immigrant vote. When that changes, and the force of the change carries through the political world, the American vote will be regenerated among native and foreign born alike. I should make the occasion of giving an immigrant the vote the occasion for insisting upon the duties that must go with the exercise of it. At present the immigrant is too much in possession of the idea that it is a right and a privilege—partly sold to him, and which it is his privilege—or duty—to sell or contribute to his benefactors or superiors in return.

The problem before the political parties has long been how to extend the social ideal and how to make it count in the body politic. The “politicians” of vigor and imagination cherish a practical hope of organizing the idealism of men, restoring human belief and values to party organization. In the peculiar opportunity now presented to the country to take stock of its citizenship, to reënforce its unity, to justify itself as a democracy, to make the most of its powers, to use the intelligence and the ardor of its citizens of many races, and to bring the newest of these into accord with its ideals and its practices, lies a great opportunity for the political parties of this country. By an organized effort to instruct newly naturalized citizens in the use of the American vote, and to bring them into real accord with the social forces behind the vote, we shall secure Americanism in politics, without which we can have no genuine preparedness.

CHAPTER VI
National Unity

Military Preparedness.
Industrial Mobilization.
Universal Service.
Americanization.
International Duty.

The decision America is called upon to make to-day is whether America shall emerge from this world-wide struggle as a nation of many peoples or whether it will imperil its very existence by remaining half native, half alien; half free and half slave to foreign influences.

We are in the midst of a bitter contest in which the forces for weakness are contending with those for strength in terms of fortifications, battleships, and guns amidst the sordid influences of appropriations, sectional selfishness, and party campaign considerations.

Preparedness means something more than a larger army and navy. It means also having a united America back of that army and navy.

Shall we get nothing except the material standards of preparedness from the mighty struggle in Europe, where nations are contending for the preservation of the liberties and security we now enjoy?

What will it avail this nation to build battleships and a merchant marine, if we do not at the same time create a nation-wide loyalty that will prevent explosions wrecking their holds?

Shall we strengthen our coast defenses and leave our transportation lines, upon which they depend, to be manned by unskilled workmen whom Americans have not shown how to love America, and in whom dual allegiance still persists? Shall we conserve our resources in mines, quarries, and fields and build more factories and man them with discontented workmen who will see American defenses only in terms of profit and advantage?

Shall we have citizens’ training camps and train to higher efficiency only those already filled with patriotism, or shall we in these same camps bring new and old citizens together and bring up the ranks in discipline and efficiency for a better America?

Can we become a really strong nation if Americanization is for native-born men and women only, while we do nothing for the millions of foreign-born men and women who constitute our reserve strength?

These and many other similar questions must be included in any adequate program of defense, and yet in no council of government or of citizens have they been given the consideration their importance demands. The great immediate task before us is mobilization and Americanization, the welding of the many races and classes in this country into one enduring, steadfast, efficient nation.

The things that make for preparedness in peace or war, that make France and Germany the two leading contestants in the present war, are as much social and economic, as military preparedness. We shall not attain this until we have Americanized our foreign-born residents and many of our American-born as well. We cannot do this by legislation or proclamation, but only by the patriotic action of each and every resident in America disciplined for national service.

Some one has brought to America a remarkable series of moving pictures called “Britain Prepared.” The conspicuous thing about them is that the emphasis is put upon the training of men, the kind of training we find in the gymnasium and in sports and among boy scouts. Guns and battleships and horses are there, to be sure, but they are always being mastered by men. Somehow in our defense propaganda during the past year we have missed this dominant note. We talk about an increased army and navy and aëroplanes and coast defenses, but we always get the sense of guns and machines and mechanics and never the sense of their mastery.

The defense bills in Congress this winter are marked by the same fatal presumption—that defense is entirely a matter of physical preparedness and that it is to be brought about chiefly by legislation and appropriations. We are apparently looking only to the immediate and obvious and popular kind of preparedness and have not yet begun upon the real problem of preparedness which involves long, slow, patient consideration of many intricate matters vital to any adequate national defense of America.

I believe that the work of the agitator and propagandist in arousing America is about done. The hundreds of volunteer, happy-go-lucky, hit-and-miss organizations throughout the country that have divided public attention with Congress have accomplished their task. We are entering upon the serious business of investigation, organization, and administration. We are ready for a policy, a program, and a leader. We are ready to act as a nation and not as the spokesman for any section or race.

A thoroughgoing policy of national preparedness to insure national unity and action cannot comprise less than five main divisions, all proceeding together toward a common goal. They are military preparedness, industrial mobilization, universal service, Americanization, and international duty.

Military defense has centered chiefly upon the army and navy and has dealt largely with numbers and appropriations. The pending measures can hardly be said to represent a policy. The conflicting provisions scarcely constitute a program.

Let us see how we have approached this subject: Under the guise of a first and immediate defense step we are urged to provide for a tunnel through the Rocky Mountains; for a road connecting two forts in Georgia; for rifle clubs, the Federal government to supply the rifles; for a national aviation corps school; for volunteer training camps for high school students; for the purchase of the Chesapeake & Delaware Canal; for a naval or a military academy in this or that particular state; for a “multiroad highway”; for a marvelous continental army on a voluntary plan, whereby 88,000 men are to enlist for six months, a second 88,000 within sixty days, and so on “as long as in the opinion of the President this procedure is necessary to public welfare.” This last bill well illustrates the detached point of view we have adopted toward the defense issue—an army of volunteers, i.e. whoever see fit, is to be raised overnight, and another army two months later and so on, so long as the President thinks there is any danger. Then this volunteer force is to dissolve into civilian life, and we are all to rest easy again until the next scare comes—when we shall again leave it to the most adventurous or the most conscientious among us to make up a hasty miscellaneous volunteer force to defend our homes and our liberty.

There is the usual supply of academic bills providing for commissions to investigate this or that aspect of defense. No doubt accurate information and therefore investigation on many points is necessary, but—the commission is too often a death chamber. By one bill a joint committee of the House and Senate is instructed as one of a series of academic charges to “investigate the advisability of universal service.” The problem has come upon the horizon, so to speak, and in a leisurely and philosophical way we get out our field glasses to observe it.

We have been doing too many sums in our defense propaganda. How many men in the army, how many millions of dollars for the navy,—all of these important,—but when an adequate plan is worked out for training every man and woman, according to his or her capacity, the numbers will take care of themselves. Until we are all “volunteers” we can dispense with mathematics.

The defense legislation of the year is evidence of heartbreaking national failure. The collection of sectional, personal, sometimes obviously dishonest, and, at best, ill-considered bills, evidences a graver charge than the political “expediencies” to which we are well enough accustomed. They are a testimony to the faithlessness of legislators in the highest places of the land, a miserable failure in patriotism, and that they have gone on so many months unchallenged is another proof of the supine patience, flabbiness, and stupidity of the average American citizen.

What should we have done? We had ample warning when Congress adjourned in 1915 that we would face the issue of preparedness as a vital compelling matter in 1916. Instead of depending upon separate and often conflicting reports from various departments and staff officers, the party in power should have had in hand in December—when Congress reassembled—the outline of a national policy, substantiated by certified facts, along which a series of bills could have been drafted to meet the needs at all points, and to avoid duplications at any point. Then the reserves of the majority party should have begun their own nation-wide campaign to carry their program. Failing this, the minority party in Congress had its opportunity. Such a plan would have rallied all the citizenship force for defense in support of its program and would have avoided the conflicts that now wage throughout the land. This program broadly conceived would have commanded the most comprehensive information in the country; not only from the Interstate Commerce Commission on transportation; from the Federal trade commission on industrial capacities and reserves; from the Public Health Service on port conditions; from the Federal reserve board on credit; from the Department of Labor on conserving men and stabilizing labor and Americanizing aliens, but it would have had the coöperation of such organizations as the American Federation of Labor and the United States Chamber of Commerce. The best thought of the country would have been crystallized, and instead of the prevailing chaos we would have a program free from partisan or sectional influences. Instead of haggling over the number of men, and where to get the money, and resurrecting letters from files to prove responsibility, we would be reapportioning our army posts on the basis of national defense, instead of on the basis of a civil war; we would be locating our munition plants in safe places; we would be building model ammunition plants, we would have an aviation corps and training schools worthy of the name—and Villa would not have raided Texas.

We are about where we started so far as actual accomplishment is concerned. I think but little of writing a statute and appropriating money until we see who is to spend the money and where. Nine tenths of the achievement for success lies in the organization and administration which follows the passing of laws. We are in the Congressional eleventh hour still agitating for a council to gather the necessary information, and propose a plan, which the Cabinet officers should have had in hand and operation jointly months ago. The whole situation has become so muddled that there is no one non-partisan, scientific, accurate, efficient, dependable source to which one can go and obtain the information necessary to formulate a policy or outline a program, and we have not yet established our first line of defense in an unassailable position.

The mobilization of industry is as important as the mobilization of men. The enlisted men must be taken from offices and shops and we must still maintain our output in products, get it to the places it is needed, when it is needed, and in prime condition. Soldiers without supplies and arms are useless; as are civilians behind the line.

The business of industry is to meet the demands and opportunities of foreign markets and to supply the needs of America; to transport men and supplies upon short notice on a large scale.

The work of industrial preparedness is not the primary task of government—it is the obligation of every plant in America, every leader at the head of it, every workman within it.

America has capital, resources, inventions, and leadership. It is short of average men to meet its industrial as well as citizenship needs. The country needs to keep every able-bodied man in America by making him an efficient, loyal citizen and by giving him, not a job, but a stake in the industry and a home stake in the country.

First of all in mobilizing industries we need an inventory so the government may know the location and capacity of its plants and who mans them; what the investment is and whether there are any international strings tied to the business and of what kind. It needs to know its present capacity, what it makes best, and how far its capacity can be increased, if need be. It needs to know how its products are transported and marketed; whether army supplies have ever been made and what agreements might be entered into. After twenty months of the war, the schedule for such an inventory has been formulated by a volunteer committee and paid for with private funds!

This is the Industrial Preparedness Committee of the Naval Consulting Board, of which Mr. Howard Coffin is chairman. It proposes first to take an inventory of the resources of 30,000 industries, each to be covered by an engineer. This in itself is a magnificent educational measure. It will make these engineers and industries think about a great many questions they have not faced before. This Committee has secured the coöperation of the Associated Advertising Clubs of the World, of which Mr. Herbert Houston is president. This insures the most widespread and accurate publicity of work and results, free from any political manipulation. It also insures a highly intelligent and forceful education of the public, free from self-interest or organization interest. The unfortunate thing is that this inventory comes too late for Congress to make any real use of the results unless it stays in session very late. It is also not yet clear just how these results will be related to other important fields or whether the Secretary of the Navy will bury them somewhere. The essential thing, however, is that we have a wholly satisfactory industrial preparedness program under way in the hands of men the country trusts for ability, integrity, efficiency, and knows to be without self-interest.

So far as I am aware we are not dealing with the conservation of resources in any such way, as this inventory applies only to manufacturing. I believe the different Federal departments have been called upon to make some such survey and report, but its results seem not to have found their way into action nor to have the coöperation of practical business men. Agricultural organization also we consider of little interest in defense, even though the land feeds the nation.

Undoubtedly a most important factor in our national defense is transportation. The President has recommended an inquiry into railroad rates and regulation, but the resolution introduced does not seem to go beyond the subject of rates. It does not seem to include a study of the railroad situation by a competent staff that would be prepared to take over and operate the railroads for military purposes if the necessity arose; it does not imply that we might need a railway construction corps for use in a military zone, taking the places of the aliens now employed on this work. It does not indicate that there is need for our army officers and leading railway officers to get together in times of peace in order to prevent friction in time of war. It does not indicate that there is need of approved regulations which should be formulated now so they could be put into operation immediately should occasion arise. There is no indication that it might be well to provide a way by which operating men should become army officers in time of war and thus have the handling of supplies under an efficient military direction.

The country is fortunate in having a competent committee appointed by the American Railway Association, Mr. Fairfax Harrison, president of the Southern Railway Co., Mr. W. G. Besler, president Central R. R. of N. J., R. H. Aishton, vice president, Chicago & Northwestern R. R., Chicago, Ill., and A. W. Thompson, general manager of the Baltimore & Ohio R. R.

The work of this Committee has not yet been definitely related to the Federal departments which could make most use of its experience, knowledge, and ability. It is ready to devote itself to this question along such important lines as the following among many others:

First, a distinct understanding between the War Department and the railroads should be arrived at concerning the tariffs for military traffic, freight, passenger, and baggage, in order that there may be no confusion whatever on these points when the time comes to move large bodies.

Second, the simplification of the settlement of railway accounts in consequence of such agreements.

Third, complete and competent agreement in regard to the classification and traffic on impedimenta accompanying troops so as to deliver the burden of the paper work that ordinarily nowadays is essential to the shipment of such bodies and impedimenta.

Fourth, the physical operations of the railroads in carrying supplies to mobilization points, concentration points, and embarkation points, must be coördinated and regulated. The necessity of having a uniform method and a complete understanding between the Department and the railroads is of course obvious.

Fifth, a clear arrangement should be had with the proper officials of the railways in regard to provisions for spurs, switches, side tracks, and all facilities for handling troops and supplies on reaching mobilization points and concentration points and embarkation points or the base of operations.

“There should be some means of bringing together railroad men, including the freight and passenger traffic departments, the construction and operating branches of the railroads, in close consultation with the officers of the army whose function it is to provide for the transportation of troops and supplies. There should be provision made for a reserve corps, not only of railroad men, but of all that class of civilians whose services could be used advantageously in the army in a directing capacity—railroad men of every description, whether belonging to the operating branch or the accounting branch, the passenger or freight department, or the construction branch. Automobile experts of every class would be in very great demand. We have a paper organization which would exactly fit the accomplishments of men of that character. Men having exceptional knowledge of the handling and distribution of great quantities of supplies would be invaluable. Men recruited from all the industries of peace should form such a reserve corps as would be available for immediate service upon mobilization.”

The weakest point in industrial preparedness is the question of labor supply. We deal with resources and transportation on the assumption that our supply of men is adequate and all sufficient in training and efficiency. This is by no means the case, and in order to cover this defect, the Immigration Committee of the United States Chamber of Commerce is making an inventory of the labor supply and its conservation. It began its work with a questionnaire upon the probable immigration after the war. With the coöperation of the railways it received 934 replies, representing about 20,000 rail and steamship agents, based upon their inquiries among some 2,000,000 foreign-born peoples in this country. The questions covered were the following:

A. Are those of foreign birth or parentage in this country saving money at the present time with a view to bringing their European relatives and friends to this country after the War?

B. Does the personal correspondence which they are receiving from Europe indicate that there will be any considerable movement to this country after the War is over, and what, so far as you can get the information, do the estimates indicate as to the volume?

C. Will such immigration as does come consist of people who have been working on farms, or of those from the factories?

D. After the War is over, will there be any considerable emigration from this country to Europe of those going back to live permanently there?

E. How great will be the movement of those going back to Europe temporarily after the War to look after their relatives, or through sentiment to view the destruction of their early homes, et cetera, and who will return to this country after a short visit?

The Committee is now following this with a schedule to industries covering the source of the labor supply, labor turn-over, methods of employment, promotions, transfers, and voluntary lay-offs, insurance, and other methods in use to conserve the labor of the country. It includes inquiries into the living conditions, as housing and sanitation, and into citizenship and knowledge of English.

From the data already at hand, it has begun holding a series of conferences with industrial leaders throughout the country, looking toward the conserving of men, keeping immigrants in America, and stabilizing the labor market. It is essential, however, that the fields of production, transportation, conservation of resources and of the labor supply be brought together and a national policy be worked out as the result of the combined effort. It is important that this whole field be related to universal service and military preparedness. Let us illustrate the nature of the interdependence.

In any system of universal service there needs to be some plan of industrial adjustment, as to time, payments, and releases from work, so that the burden will not fall too heavily upon special industries at critical times of output. The efficiency records of plants make the selection of good officers easier. There needs to be a careful handling of skilled labor in order that it may not be withdrawn too heavily at vital points. Even our voluntary civilian training camps are being filled with coöperation of industry, which is arranging vacations, paying wages during the training period, and urging its men, by competition and in other ways, to attend. No military system can operate successfully without understanding effort on the part of production and transportation men. The pursuit of Villa showed the absence of this, and to date it seems to be largely a moral victory.

When we have this information along many lines, industry is not mobilized. We have but secured the knowledge to begin the real task.

The mobilization of industry for America’s defense cannot stop with the plant. Is the employer’s responsibility ended with the eight-hour day and an increase in wages? The best-equipped plant in the world will not give us strong, able, efficient men unless they live decently, have the right kind of recreation, and get a home stake in the country to defend. There are minimum standards in the matters of numbers, separation of sexes, family privacy, sanitation, and cleanliness which no American workman can fall below and be a loyal citizen fit for defense. It is part of the mobilization of industry to see that conditions do not prevail which give American defense men unable or unwilling to defend it.

Industrial preparedness means a knowledge and system by which skilled workmen at strategic points in industry, supplies, and traffic shall not enlist, but will be released at the greatest point of efficiency. Telegraph companies for instance do not encourage their men to enlist, but are fitting them for signal men in time of need!

We have in all of our preparedness activity failed to grasp the point that there can be no industrial preparedness without the nationalization of business. An inventory of resources and the utilization of the full power of each plant is only possible when all men coöperate for a mutual end and not when they compete for contracts. The employer who cares nothing about the labor market so long as he has plenty of men does little to stabilize that market or regularize employment or distribute men advantageously, and yet in the final analysis defense comes back to efficient, loyal, individual men doing their full duty at some inconspicuous post all over the country.

The nationalization of business is not a matter of legislation, or of regulation, or of coercion. It is the duty and obligation of each responsible person in industry—all working together on a national coöperative basis instead of on a local, sectional, competitive basis. It means a new spirit abroad in business—patriotic Nationalism.

We have come to regard universal service, with a period of compulsory training in a military camp, as a measure of military defense only. We seem to think it means only learning how to shoot and acquiring a thirst for blood. I believe it has a great civic value hitherto disregarded. We have two things to acquire from the training camp: individual proficiency and team work, and a national spirit and point of view.

The American factory and the American city have failed as a melting pot.—The dog tent may succeed. It may become the best school of practical civics there is—a place where all Americans can meet together for the common good of America.

It may restore the balance to our triumvirate of the Declaration of Independence—Liberty, opportunity, and obligation. We have demanded and used the first two—we have neglected the third.

The civilian training-camp movement, which started at Plattsburg and is now continued at Fort Oglethorpe, is the biggest civic movement in America, and when crystallized along the lines of the Swiss system, will become the dynamo for national progress in America. There can be no question but that America is desperately in need of some national civic movement which is in its interest alone and which represents nothing but itself.

America is full of undisciplined, native-born young men and has besides a large transfusion of still raw foreigners. It could not bestow any greater favor upon its young men than to give all of them the benefits of military methods of drilling and education. It would “set them up” physically; they would acquire a knowledge of hygiene, sanitation, prevention of disease, etc., and they would also learn, to their great advantage, obedience, promptness, precision, regularity of habits, abstinence, economy, avoidance of waste, and respect for authority, all of which would make them more competent for their daily tasks—whatever they may be. Germany perhaps furnishes the best example of a well-governed people, but what the world needs is to govern itself, just as the best men are the men who exercise self-control.

Many of our young men, in their desire to remain “independent,” are inefficient, unreliable, and irresponsible; they are disobedient, headstrong, or rebellious under authority; they are discourteous, careless of obligations, and indifferent to broken promises. The average boy is prompt with excuses and self-justification under discipline—and this has been seen most conspicuously in our nation’s attitude in the present war.

Inevitably all of this leads to slovenly work; to indifferent citizenship; to play in which entertainment, not participation, is the rule; and to a shifting of responsibility in all walks of life. In the supplementing of individual by social ideals; in the transition from individual to social conscience; in the great change from personal to social control of many individual affairs, we have somehow lost the finer traits of character and those ancient Christian virtues which make for strong nations as well as for strong men.

I believe the training camp is unparalleled in its power to develop social consciousness and social control, and to show men the means by which they can work together for a common end. America needs sportsmanship in the best sense of the word, and the training camp can give it. America needs the abolition of its foolish class lines, now drawn in industry and in society; emphasized among races and by creeds, and nowhere worse than in the army itself. There is no place for it in the training camp. American industry has failed to Americanize the foreign-born citizens through its pay envelope; the training camp may succeed through the dog tent.

In our idea of universal service we should not stop with the training camp. There are hundreds of thousands of men and women, with a desire to serve, that cannot go to the training camp. We have throughout the country to-day a splendid expression of the desire to serve.

I believe that every citizen of this republic, male or female, and of any age after childhood, should have a regular scheme of duties, a regular enlistment for service of a definite nature suited to his or her status of capacity, which he must be prepared to render upon demand, and which he or she must keep in training to deliver. To work out the plans for such service for men and women alike, whether in motor corps, red cross camps, health service, or in many other ways, may well be the charge of citizens’ defense organizations, but they should be related to the civilian training camp to maintain standards and methods and unity.

The defense organizations, some fifty of national name and scope, are missing their great opportunity. They are getting people to sign pledge cards focusing attention, as it should be focused, on legislation and party programs. But they are not lining up the citizenship of the country in definite citizenship service. And by their lack of coöperation and lack of actual information about one another’s activities, they are further splitting up and sectionalizing sentiment where the real necessity is to collect and focus it. All over the country, in this place or that, groups of citizens are trying in a promising way to form definite, practical, little associations for training and defense. Aside from the training-camp movement now so hopefully developed, business men are joining together to try to settle upon uniform ways of coöperating with training camps and the national guard by making it possible for their employees to profit by these and to render national service in this way. People that own motors or own or control motor trucks are getting together to see how they could work out the transportation service which experts agree would be an absolute necessity in case of war in this country. Rifle clubs are being formed, business men are training one night a week in armories, women are forming red cross branches with definite courses of instruction in many cities, schoolboys are being sent to camps, suburbanites are organizing to breed police and army dogs, city tradesmen are organizing parades.

But as a whole the civilian defense movement is confused and incoherent, not nationally coördinated, having no national guidance or even suggestion. If the various defense organizations were to get together in a spirit of coöperation, they could gather up and unite these sporadic citizens’ movements all over the country, give them standards of organization and accomplishment, start movements in different states which are as yet practically untouched by defense sentiment. Just as the Industrial Preparedness Committee of the Naval Consulting Board is working out the mobilization of industry throughout the country down to the last practical detail, so the preparedness organizations in combination could work out the mobilization of civilian resources and activities throughout the country. In some way all of these efforts should be brought into relation with each other under control and direction and discipline. They should be associated with the training camps and recognized as volunteer corps and be given the standing necessary to perfect their organization and administer their control. We have passed the stage of propaganda; we now need organization and administration of volunteer efforts if we are not to waste the precious patriotism and enthusiasm for Americanism throughout the country.

Americanization is basic preparedness. It is fundamental and enduring. The first question is how to nationalize our native-born American into doing his duty in the military training camp, in his industry, in his town, at the polls, with the welfare of the nation in his mind, and national service as his purpose. No system of laws, no plan of administration will do this—it is a problem for leaders, for education, for the spirit of the youth of America to grapple with. The reason so many public monuments, promisingly begun in America, fall through or dwindle, is because it is so difficult, so well-nigh impossible without constantly renewed stimulants, to keep individuals firm and enthusiastic in a social and national point of view. The defense movement has illustrated on a broader scale the same thing that has been illustrated in this country many times before—the American religion of individualism in arrogant array against a critical national need. Only two things—a rediscovery of a stern sense of duty among American youth; and a recovery of that stern idealism that persistently exacts of men a social responsibility, a consideration of a first claim beyond the claim of family, personal success, career—can establish American citizenship on a sound basis. With the native American these things are, as I have said, a rediscovery. The tradition exists and was incorporated in the very principles of our foundation.

With the immigrants, it is different. They come to us, mostly adults, with certain specific needs and tendencies, and here we need to assume a constructive and painstaking task—that of interpreting the principles of Americanism and the obligations as well as the privileges of American citizenship to the men we invite to come here to do American work, and permit to be a large percentage of the population of many American industrial towns.

Immigration is a great force in American life. It is not, as has often hitherto been regarded, a labor subject or a health subject. It is primarily a citizenship subject, to be administered along the broad lines of nationalism and the future best interests of all America. It is properly an interior subject, and all of our dealings with it should proceed from a consideration of conditions in America. We admit or reject people because of the effect on America; we distribute them to avoid congestion, misery, and bad conditions in cities and to develop America; we educate them for citizenship in America; we protect them, looking again toward a better citizenship. We can never have a real policy of dealing with our immigrant people, from the time they arrive until they become citizens, so long as officials remain as they are, unless the administration of existing laws, the drafting of new laws, gathering of necessary information, and formulation of broad policies, rest with some one department. Somehow we must treat this matter as a citizenship and not as a labor matter. It is useless to preach to the employer that he cease to regard the immigrant as a cog in his machinery when the government puts this stamp upon him when it admits him. We now have a probationary period of five years for citizenship. We can well use that as the period for applying our immigration policy which shall begin with his admission, exclusion, and deportation within that period—the deportation clause being extended to conform to the citizenship standard.

What does Americanization mean in national defense?

It means putting the American flag above all others, abolishing dual citizenship, and pledging open allegiance to America.

It means American citizenship for every alien within our borders, or deportation and closing our doors to political scouts and birds of passage. We can no longer endure as a “polyglot boarding house.” Citizenship will give us an intelligent body of voters, for it will mark the end of the “voting the hunkies” by ward bosses. This desecration of American citizenship cannot exist side by side with an aggressive effort on the part of the public schools of the country to instruct the foreign born, adults as well as children, in the real meaning of citizenship. It means, finally, economic stability. The thousands of immigrants that become “birds of passage” and return to their own country because they have never been able to make any American contact except through their pay envelope will be enabled really to settle their homes, their affections, and their earnings in America, increasing the prosperity of the immigrant family here, cementing its bonds with this country, and also contributing to the prestige and prosperity of the American nation.

It means one language for all America and the elimination of illiteracy. Confusion of tongues and ignorance of American institutions and opportunities are foes of efficient preparedness. This means the end of “Little Italys,” “Little Hungaries,” and the end of filthy, remote foreign villages on the outskirts of our towns and cities, inhabited by foreign-speaking men and women with no way of learning American standards of living and American customs, and with no way to protest against standards of living which in many cases they do not “lower” at all, but which they accept only because they are too ignorant to protest when the conditions are forced upon them. There are to-day thousands of communities where decent living conditions do not and cannot prevail. Our war contracts are starting boom towns that are a menace to our very civilization and a source of danger in time of war. It means a higher level of intelligence, the wiping out of illiteracy, and the establishment of the rule of the English language and of a common citizenship.

It means the abolition of class prejudices and of racial hatreds and of the intolerance of the old stock for new stock, which stand in the way of United America.

It means one American standard of living. As we cannot have a double standard of morality, we cannot have a double standard of living. We can no longer sacrifice the preservation of this country to industrial necessities. So long as our industrial communities are made up of large groups of un-Americanized immigrants, without the English language, without an understanding of American conditions, too helpless to bring their grievances to the attention of their employers, too ignorant to understand or trust compromises, if compromises are offered, too ignorant to force them in legitimate ways if they are not offered, able to understand only the radical agitators addressing them in their own language—just so long will the industrial history of America be blotted by Ludlows, Lawrences, and Wheatlands. The road to American citizenship, to the English language, and an understanding of American social and political ideals is the road to industrial peace.

It means the Americanization of women. Now women automatically become citizens with their fathers and husbands, although in some states they vote. The best Americanization agency is the home. We can only reach foreign-born women in their homes, and we must go to them. They are now isolated, forgotten, ignored, and constitute the greatest single backward factor in the progress of citizenship among women.

It means, lastly, not America first and safety first, which are sectional and selfish banners under which no man can fight his best, but liberty, justice, honor, and right first.

This is no small task. The figures for 1910 tell us that America has about thirty-three million foreign-born people and persons of foreign-born parentage. One third have, therefore, in our immediate environment foreign traditions and standards. The problem is to keep the best of these and make them serve America. No nation in the civilized world would think itself “prepared” with such an internal situation, and yet we officially ignore it.

These intricate, delicate, interlocking questions, mostly unsolved in any national way, are found in education, savings and investments, standards of living, and in all of the other fields before us. They are as important and as difficult as those we are solving in military defenses and industrial mobilization. They are the problems of nationalism—the things that make the immigrant man a good citizen, workman, or soldier. They must be considered in any movement for a unified America. They have always been approached by our government from some sectional, local, or isolated point of view. They have never been approached from the national point of view. The 42 volumes of the Federal Immigration Commission are silent on a national policy other than the negative one of exclusion. They deal exhaustively with conditions in industry, in philanthropy, but nowhere do they lead us to a policy of a program for America that meets its present requirements.

We shall never attain this united America back of our firing line, in our shops, in our cities, in our schools, on our great arteries of communications and supply, by the most intelligent policy, by the wisest of laws, by the fairest enforcement of law, unless each and every American resident does his share—and realizes that a prepared America at every point comes back to him and to him alone.

We shall not accomplish preparedness through Americanization without organization. We have the beginnings of many excellent movements of Americanization, in much the same state as our army and navy. Each bureau interested in some phase of the subjects carries on its work, drafts bills, and enforces laws. We are as wholly lacking in policy, program, and leadership as in any other phase of preparedness. We do not yet recognize as a nation that Americanization is fundamental preparedness and should be vitally related to military and industrial preparedness and to universal service.

No policy of preparedness can be complete without a strong sense of international duty and a willingness to defend it as loyally as American institutions. We are emerging from the haze of what we should have done to preserve international law. We have before us some pertinent problems which will test this new-found honor.

We owe it to ourselves, in our new treaties and new relations arising after the war, to have a thorough understanding in regard to citizenship so the protection of the American flag will follow every citizen, native and foreign born, to every country in the world under whatever conditions.

We owe it to the people who come to our shores asking admission that all of the regulations of aliens should be in our national admission law and not hidden in state and local laws preventing their earning a living and becoming good citizens. This whole law should be based upon America’s welfare and capacity for making these men and women good citizens. We do not want them unless they are willing to join with us for defense of American liberty.

When we have a common policy which all America understands and believes; a program to which every American can give efficient and loyal service; and leaders that Americans can and will follow, then we shall be a prepared nation,—standing again as we stood one hundred and forty years ago: for justice and right and liberty.

“And in support of these truths
we mutually pledge to each other
our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.”

Printed in the United States of America.

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Table of Contents

- STRAIGHT AMERICA A CALL TO NATIONAL SERVICE
- CONTENTS
- CHAPTER I What is the Matter with America?

- CHAPTER II Americanism

- What is Americanism?

- CHAPTER III The Native American
- CHAPTER IV America-made Citizens
- CHAPTER V The Popular Vote
- CHAPTER VI National Unity

- OUR NATIONAL PROBLEMS

- Americanization
- The Heritage of Tyre
- Their True Faith and Allegiance
- The Forks of the Road
- The Pentecost of Calamity

- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE