Change and Status
For the European system stood againstbecoming; its objective was to remain, to be still, to stand. Its ancient greatness and the tone of time which made it lovely, both came from this faith in the steady long-abiding changelessness of human institutions. All that it possessed was built to endure for ever;its cathedrals, its prisons, its symbols, its systems—including the symbols and the systems by which it denied freedom to its people. Each national-racial-religious complex of Europe was a triple anchor against change; it prevented men from drifting as the great winds of revolution and reform swept over Europe. Nor were men permitted to change, as they pleased. Nations waged war and won land, but neither the Czars nor the German Emperors thought of the Poles as their own people; the Poles were irrevocably Poles, excluded from the nobler society of Russians, Austrians and Germans. Religious societies made converts, but looked with fear or hatred or suspicion against the very people from whom the converts came—the Jew was irretrievably a Jew, the Catholic a Catholic. In each country one religion was uppermost, the rest tolerated. In each country one folk-group was dominant, the rest tolerated or persecuted. And in each country one class—the same class—ruled, and all other classes served.
By ones or twos, men and women might be accepted into the established church, marry into the dominant race, rise to the governing class; but the exceptions proved nothing. The European believed in hisstationin life, his civilstatus, thestandingof his family in the financial or social world. The Englishman settling in Timbuctoo remained an Englishman because the Englishman at home remained a middle-class bank clerk or "not a gentleman" or a marquess; and while an alien could become a subject of the King, he never for a moment imagined that he could become an Englishman—any more than a Scot. The English knew that names change; men do not.
Only when they came to America, they did.
They did because the basic American system, the dynamics of becoming American, rejected the racialism of Europe; it rejected aggressive nationalism by building a new nation; it rejected an established religion; and almost in passing it destroyed the class-system.
To the familiar European systems of damnation—by original sin, by economic determinism, by pre-natal influence—has been added a new one—damnation by racial inferiority; the Chamberlain-Wagner-Nietzsche-Rosenberg-Hitler myth of the superior race-nation means in practise that whoever is not born German is damned to serve Germany; there is no escape because the inferiority is inherent. This is the European class-system carried to its loftiest point.
We say that this system is inhuman, unscientific, probably suicidal. The poverty-system on which Europe "prospered" for generations and into which we almost fell, was also inhuman, unscientific and probably suicidal; there is no logic in the British aristocratic system coupled with a financial-industrial overlordship and universal suffrage; there is little logic even in our own setup of vast organizations of labor, huge combinations of money, unplumbed technical skill hampered by both capital and labor, and some forty million underfed and half sick human beings in the most productive land in the world. It is not logic we look for in the framework of human society; we look for operations. What does it do? For all its failures, our system works toward human liberty; for all its success, the Nazi system works against human liberty. We tend to give more and more people an opportunity to change and improve; their system is based on the impossibility of change. Our system is a nation built out of many races; theirs is a nation excluding all but one race. Our system has lapses, we do not grant citizenship to certain Orientals nor social equality to Negroes; but we do not write racial inferiority into our laws, we do not teach it inourschools (it may be taught in sectional schools we tolerate, but do not support); and this is important. So long as we accept the ideal of political equality, hope lives for every man. The moment we abandon it, we nazify ourselves—and destroy the foundation of the Republic.
Americans All
Turning from the brutal leveling and uniformity of the Nazis, good Americans have begun to wish that more of the folk qualities of our settlers had been preserved. At every point America is the enemy of fasci-feudalism, and this is no exception. Our music, our dancing, the language we speak, the foods we eat, all incorporate elements brought from Europe; but we have not deliberately encouraged the second generation to preserve clothes and cooking any more than we have encouraged the preservation of political habits. There has been a loss in variety and color; and now, while there is still time, efforts are being made to create a general American interest in the separate cultures combined here. It has to be carefully done, so that we do not lose sight of the total American civilization in our enthusiasm for the contributing parts. There is always the chance that descendants of Norwegians, proud and desperate as they consider the plight of their country, will become nationalistic here; and that they will not be interested in the music or the art of Ukrainians in America; and that Americans of Italian descent may be the only ones concerned in adding to the Italian contribution to American life. This is the constant danger of all work concerned with immigrant groups; and the supersensitiveness of all these groups, in a period of intense 100%-ism, tends to defeat the purpose of assaying what each has done to help all the others.
Yet some success is possible. In 1938 I worked with the Office of Education on a series of broadcasts which drew its title from the President's remark to the Daughters of the American Revolution, that we are all the descendants of immigrants. (The President also added "and revolutionaries", but this was not essential in our broadcasts.) Everything I now feel about the focal position of the immigrant in American life is developed from the work done on the Immigrants All series and, especially, from the difficultiesencountered, as well as from one special element of success.
I set down some basic principles: that the programs would notglorifyone national group after another; that the interrelation of each arriving group to the ones already here would be noted; the vast obligation of every immigrant to those who had prepared the way would be stressed; cooperation between groups would be dramatically rendered if possible; the immigrants' contribution to America would be paralleled by America's contribution to the immigrant; and the making of America, by its natives and its immigrants, would overshadow the special contribution of any single group.
These were principles. In practise, some disappeared, but none was knowingly violated. From time to time, enthusiasts for a given group would complain that another had been more warmly treated; more serious was the indifference of many leaders of national and folk groups to the general problem of the immigrant, to any group outside their own. We were, by that time, in a period of sharpened national sensibilities; but this did not entirely account for an apparently ingrained habit of considering immigrant problems as problems of one's own group, only. Suspicion of other groups went with this neglect of the problem as a whole; the natives born with longer American backgrounds were the ones who showed a clearer grasp of the whole problem; they were not bothered by jealousies and they were interested in America.
On the other side, the series had an almost spectacular success. More than half of the letters after each weekly broadcast came from men and women who werenotdescendants of the national group presented that week. After the program on the Irish, some 48% of the letters were from Irish immigrants or native-born descendants of the Irish; the other 52% came from children of Serbs and FFV's and Jews and Portuguese, from Sicilians and Germans and Scots, Scandinavians and Englishmen and Greeks. It was so for all of the programs; the defects of the scripts were forgotten, because the people who heard them were so much better Americansthan anyone had dared predict. Of a hundred thousand letters, almost all were American, not sectarian in spirit; the bitterness of the cheap fascist movements had not affected even a fringe of the listeners. All in all, we were encouraged; it seemed to us that the immigrant was accepted as the co-maker of America.
Much of our future depends on the exact place we give to the immigrant. It has been taken for granted that immigration is over and that the proportions of racial strains in America today are fixed for ever. It is not likely that vast immigration will head for the United States in the next decade; but the principle of "becoming American" will operate for the quotas and the refugees; and it is now of greater significance than ever because the great fascist countries have laid down the principle of unchangeable nationality. The Nazi government has pretended a right to call German-born American citizens to the colors; and a regular practise of that government is to plant "colonies" as spies.
If we do not re-assert the principle of change of nationality (the legal counterpart to the process of becoming American) we will be lost in the aggressive nationalism of the Nazis, and we will no longer be safe from racialism. Preposterous as it will seem to scholars, degrading as it will be to men of sense, racialism can establish itself in America by the re-assertion of Anglo-Saxonism (with variations).
Are We Anglo-Saxon?
At this point the direct political implications of "becoming American" become evident. Toward the end of this book there are some questions about union with Britain; the point to note here is that so far as Union-now (or any variant thereof) is based emotionally on the Anglo-Saxonism of the United States of America, it is based on a myth and is politically an impossible combination; if we plan union with Britain, let it be based on the actuality of the American status,not on a snobbish desire. We cannot falsify our history, not even in favor of those who did most for our history.
There is a way, however, of imputing Anglo-Saxonism to America, which is by starting with the great truth: the English and the Scots—and the Scots-Irish—founded the first colonies (some time after the Spaniards to be sure, but that is "a detail"); they established here certain basic forms of law and cultivated the appetite for freedom; they were good law-abiding citizens, and accustomed to self-discipline; they were great pioneers in the wilderness; they suffered for religious liberty and more than any other national or racial group, they fought the War of Independence.
Can we say these men created the true, the original America; and everything since then has been a corruption of its 100% goodness and purity? This would allow us to rejoice in Andrew Carnegie, but not in George W. Goethals; in Hearst but not in Pulitzer; in Cyrus McCormick but not in Eleuthère Dupont; in the Wright Brothers, but not in Boeing and Bellanca; in Edison (partly as he was not all Scot) but not in his associate Berliner; in Bell who invented the telephone but not in Pupin who created long distance. We should have to denounce as un-American the civil service work of Carl Schurz and Bela Schick's test for diphtheria and Goldberger's work on pellagra (which was destroying the pure descendants of the good Americans); we would have to say that America would be better off without Audubon and Agassiz and Thoreau; or Boas and Luther Burbank; or John Philip Sousa and Paul Robeson and Jonas Lie.
When we have denied all these their place in America, we can begin to belittle the contribution of still others to our national life. For the later immigrants had less to give to transportation and basic manufactures and to building the nation. These things were done by the earlier immigrants. The later ones gave their sweat and blood, and presently they and their children were troubling about education, or civilservice, or conservation of forests, or the right of free association, or art or music or philanthropy. If our own special fascists lay their hands on our traditions, the burning of books will be only a trifle; for they will tear down the museums and the settlement houses, the kindergartens and the labor temples—and when they are done they will say, with some truth, that they have purged America of its foreign influence. All reform, all culture will be destroyed by the New Klansmen, and they will re-write history to make us believe that wave after wave of corruption came from Europe (especially from Catholic and Greek Orthodox and Jewish Europe) to destroy the simple purity of Anglo-Saxon America.
That is why, now, when we can still assess the truth, when we need the help of every American, we must declare the truth, that there never was a purely Anglo-Saxon United States. Frenchmen and Swedes and Spaniards and Negroes and Walloons and Hollanders and Portuguese and Finns and Germans and German Swiss were here before 1700; Quakers, Catholics, Freethinkers and Jews fought side by side with Huguenots, Episcopalians, Calvinists and Lutherans in the wars with the Indians. In the colony of Georgia, in the year Washington was born, men of six nations had settled: German Lutherans, Italian Protestants, Scots, Swiss, Portuguese, Jews and English. In 1750 four times as many Germans arrived in Pennsylvania as English and Irish together.
The Creative Anglo-Saxon
The greatness of the Anglo-Saxon contribution to America—the gift greater than all their other great gifts—was the conception of a state making over the people who came here, and made over by them. By the end of the Revolution, power and prestige were in the hands of the Anglo-Saxon majority; and in three successive instruments they destroyed the idea of Anglo-Saxon superiority: the Declaration of Independence,the Ordnance of 1787, the Constitution. "Becoming" was not an ideal and it was not the base of Anglo-Saxon society in England; the concept of change and "becoming" was based on actuality; on what was happening all over the colonial dominion. People were becoming American, even before a new nation was born.
All that followed—the vast complexity of creating America, would have been impossible without that first supreme act of creative self-sacrifice. When the statesmen of our Revolutionary period established the principles of statehood and naturalization and citizenship in terms of absolute equality, they knew the risk they ran. In Pennsylvania the official minutes were printed in both English and German; in Maryland the Catholics were dominant; there were still some influential Dutch along the upper Hudson who might secede from New York. On the western boundary, unsettled, uneasy, lay the Spaniards and the French. There was danger of division, everywhere; but the great descendants of the English immigrants did not withdraw. Their principle was equality; since men were born free, they couldbecomeequal if artificial barriers were removed. The statesmen of that day declared for America; they knew that men did not, in this country, remain Dutch or Portuguese; but grew into something else. With their own eyes they had seen it happen. They pledged their lives and sacred honor that it would happen again.
So, if ever we re-write history to prove that all the other nations contributed nothing and failed to become Americans, we will also have to write it down that the Anglo-Saxons failed more miserably than the others. For the great idea, the practical dynamics of equality, was theirs; they set it in motion, guarded it, and saw it triumph.
In the next ten years it will be impossible to extemporize an immigration policy for the United States. The world economy will change all around us; the dreadful alternationsof plenty and starvation may be adjusted and controlled; we may enter a world order in which we will be responsible for a given number of souls, and some of these may be admitted to our country. By that time we will have learned that nationalist fascism and international communism are powerless here; and no one but professional haters of America will be left to bait the foreigners and persecute the alien.
But above all, by that time we will have had time to reassert the great practical idea behind immigration and naturalization—the idea of men making themselves over—as for a century and a half they have made themselves into Americans.
An Experiment in Evolution
Note: I have used the phrase "becoming American" and defined it as it defined itself; legally, in the customs of the country, it seems to mean becoming a citizen; experimentally "becoming" has happened to us, we have seen it happen, it means that we recognize an essential affinity between an immigrant and Americans, living or dead.
Yet to many people the words may be vague; to others they may seem a particularly dangerous lie. Those who are interested in certain foreign groups, less promptly "Americanized", will protest that for all this "becoming", some are not accepted as American; those who are basically haters of all foreigners will say that thelawaccepts citizens, but no power on earth can make them Americans.
It is my experience that the phrases created by poets, politicians and people are often the truest words about America; and one of the profound satisfactions of life is to see the wild imagery of the poet or the lush oratory of the politician come true, literally and exactly true, scientifically demonstrated and proved.
In this particular case, absolute proof is still lacking, because we are dealing with human beings, we cannot make controlled experiments. We can observe and compare. Underthe inspiration of the eminent anthropologist Dr. Franz Boas, the research has been made; so far as it goes it proves that the children of foreigners do become Americans. Specifically, their gestures, the way they stand and the way they walk, their metabolism and their susceptibility to disease, all tend to become American. In all of these aspects, there is an American norm or standard; and the children of immigrants forsaking the norm or standard of the fatherland, grow to that of America.
The most entertaining of these researches was in the field of gesture. The observers took candid movie shots of groups of Italians and of Jews; they differ from one another and both differ from the American mode (which is a composite, with probably an Anglo-Saxon dominant). The observers found that the extreme gesture of the foreign-born Jew is one in which a speaker gesticulates with one hand while with the other he holds his opponent's arm, to prevent a rival movement; and one case was noted in which the speaker actually gesticulated with the other man's arm. To the American of native stock this is "foreign"; and research proves that the American is right; such gestures are foreign even to the American-born children of the foreigner himself. The typical foreign gesture disappears and the typical American gesture takes its place.
And this is not merely imitation; it is not an "accent" disappearing in a new land. Because metabolism and susceptibility to disease are as certainly altered as gait and posture. The vital physical nature changes in the atmosphere of liberty—as the mind and the spirit change.
The frightened lie of racial doom which has fascinated the German mind (under its meaner guise of racial superiority) was never needed in America. Seeing men become Americans, the fathers of our freedom declared that nothing should prevent them; they were not afraid of any race because they knew that the men of all races would become Americans.Their faith of 1776 begins to be scientifically proved today; a hundred and sixty-six years of creative America proved it in action.
It is on the basis of what Europeans became in America, that we now have to consider our relations with the Europeans who remained in Europe.
The communications of America and Europe have always run in two channels: our fumbling, foolish diplomacy, our direct, candid, successful dealings with the people.
Our first word was to the people of Europe; the Declaration of Independence tried to incite the British people against their own Parliament; and the "decent respect to the opinions of mankind" refers to citizens, not to chancelleries. The Declaration was addressed to the world; it was heard in Paris and later in a dozen provinces of Germany, and in Savoy and in Manchester, and presently along the Nevski and the Yellow River. Since 1776, the people of the world have always listened to us, and answered. We have never failed when we have spoken to the people.
After the Declaration, the American people spoke to all the people of Europe in the most direct way: they invited Europeans to come here, offering them land, wages, freedom; presently our railroads and steamship lines solicited larger numbers; and the policy of the government added inducements. Free immigration, and free movement, demanded in the Declaration, made possible by laws under the Constitution, were creating America. In domestic life we saw it at once; but the effects of immigration on our dealings with Europe were not immediate.
We need only remember that for a hundred and twenty years the peoples of Europe and the people of the United States were constantly writing to one another; not merely doing business together, but exchanging ideas, mingling in marriage, coming together as dispersed families come together. Whatever went on in the Mississippi Valley was known along the fjords and in the Volga basin and by theDanube; if sulphur was discovered in Louisiana it first impoverished Sicily—then brought Sicilians to Louisiana; Greeks knew that sponges were to be found off Tampa. And more and more people in America knew what was happening in Europe—a famine, a revolution, a brief era of peace, a repressive ministry, a reform bill. The constant interaction of Europe and America was one beat of our existence—it was in counterpoint to the tramp of the pioneer moving Westward; immigration and migration meshed together.
Our government from time to time spoke to the governments of Europe. A tone of sharp reproof was heard at times, a warm word for revolutionaries was coupled with indignation against tyrants: Turkey, the Dual Monarchy, the Tsar, all felt the lash—or Congress hoped they felt it; in the Boer War, England was the victim of semi-official criticism; and whenever possible, we were the first to recognize republics, even if they failed to maintain themselves on the ruins of monarchy. We fluttered official papers and were embarrassed by protocol, not believing in it anyhow, and were outwitted or out-charmed by second-rate diplomatists of Europe.
People and Protocol
The campaign platforms always demanded a "firm, vigorous, dignified" diplomacy; the diplomacy of Europe was outwardly correct, inwardly devious, shifting, flexible, and in our opinion corrupt. But our address to thepeopleof Europe was, in all this time, so candid, so persuasive, that we destroyed the chancelleries and recaptured our losses. The first great communication, after 1776, was made by Lincoln—it was not a single speech or letter, it was a constant appeal to the conscience of the British people, begging them, as the Declaration had done, to override the will of their rulers. And this appeal also was successful; few events in our relations with England are more moving than the action of the starving Midlanders. Their government, like their men of wealth and birth, like their press and parliament, were eagerto see America split, and willing to see slavery upheld in order to destroy democracy. But the men and women of Manchester, starved by the Northern blockade of cotton, still begged their government not to interfere with the blockade—and sent word to Lincoln to assure him that thepeopleof Britain were on the side of liberty, imploring him "not to faint in your providential mission. While your enthusiasm is aflame, and the tide of events runs high, let the work be finished effectually. Leave no root of bitterness to spring up and work fresh misery to your children." Nor did Lincoln fail to respond; Americans who could interest Britain in the northern cause were unofficial ambassadors to the people; and our minister, Charles Francis Adams labored with all sorts and conditions of men to make the government of Britain accept the will of the British people. The Emancipation Proclamation was a final step in the domestic statesmanship of the war; it was also a step in the diplomacy of the war, for it insured us the good will of the British people; and that good will was vital to the success of the Union. The North was coming close to war with thegovernmentof Britain, and the people's open prejudice in favor of Lincoln and freedom kept England from sufficient aid to the Confederacy.
The next address of the United States to the people of Europe is a long tragedy, its consequences so dreadful today that we can barely analyze the steps by which the great work for human freedom was destroyed.
Wilson to the World
Following the precedent of the Declaration, Woodrow Wilson began in 1916 to address himself to the people of the nations at war in Europe. To ministries, German and British both, Wilson was sending expostulations on U-boats and embargos; to the peoples of Europe he addressed those speeches which were made at home; presently he wrote inquiries to the ministers which they were compelled to make public (since publication in neutral countries was certain).Then, after the Soviets of Russia had gone over the heads of the Foreign Offices, to appeal to the workers of the world, Wilson carried his own method to its necessary point and, after we entered the war, began the masterly series of addresses to the German people which were so effective in creating the atmosphere of defeat.
They created at the same time the purposes of allied victory. The war ended and one of the magnificent spectacles of modern times occurred: the people of Europe were for a moment united, and they were united by an American declaring the objectives of American life. The moment was so brief that few knew all it meant until it had passed; in the excitement of spectacles and events, of plots and processions, this moment when Europe trembled with a new hope passed unnoticed.
What happened later to Woodrow Wilson is tragic enough; but nothing can take away from America this great moment in European history—to which every observer bears testimony, even the most cynical. The defeated people of Germany saw in America their only defence against the rapacity of Clemenceau, the irresponsible, volatile opportunism of Lloyd George, the crafty merchandising of Orlando; the first "liberal" leader, Prince Max, had deliberately pretended acceptance of the fourteen points in order to embarrass Wilson; but he spoke the truth when he said that Wilson's ideals were cherished by the overwhelming majority of the Germanpeople; and quite correctly the Germans saw that nothing but American idealism stood between them and a peace of vengeance. The enthusiasm of the victorious peoples was less selfish, but it was equally great; a profound distrust of their leaders had grown in the minds of realistic Frenchmen and Britons, they sensed the incapacity of their leaders to raise the objectives of the war above the level of the "knockout blow" or therevanche. As the Germans cried to be protected in their defeat, the victorious people asked to be protected from such fruits of victory as Europe had known for athousand years. The demagogues still shouted hoarsely for a noose for the Kaiser and the old order in Germany began to plan for the next time—but the people of Europe were united; they had gone through the same war and, for the first time in their history, they wanted the same peace. It was the first time that an American peace was proposed to them.
How Wilson Was Trapped
Woodrow Wilson made a triumphal tour of the allied capitals and by the time he returned to Paris for the actual business of the peace, he had become the spiritual leader of the world. He was not, however, the political leader of his own country—he had lost the Congressional elections and he allowed the diplomats of Europe to make use of this defeat. They began to cut him off from the people of Europe; he fell into the ancient traps of statesmanship, the secret sessions, the quarrels and departures; once he recovered control, ordered steam up in the George Washington to take him home; but in the end he was outguessed—in the smart word, he was outsmarted. He had imagined that he could defeat the old Europe by refusing to recognize its intrigues. He had, in effect, declared that secret treaties and all commitments preceding the fourteen points couldn't exist; he had hoped that they would be cancelled to conform to his pious pretence of ignorance. And Clemenceau and Lloyd George kept him quarreling over a mile of boundary or a religious enclave within a racial minority; they stirred passions; they starved German children by an embargo; they rumored reparations; they promised to hang the Kaiser; they drew Wilson deeper into smaller conferences; they promised him a League about which their cynicism was boundless, and he let them have war guilt and reparations and the betrayal of the Russian revolution and the old European system triumphant. They had fretted him and tried him and they had made their own people forget the passionate faith Wilson had inspired; they made Wilson the agent of disillusion for allthat was generous and hopeful in Europe. They could do it because the moment Wilson began to talk to the premiers, he stopped talking to the people. From the moment he allowed the theme of exclusive war guilt to be announced, he cut himself off from all Germany; he did not know the temper of the working class in Europe, and he refused to listen to the men he himself had sent to report on Russia, which did not help him with the radical trade unions in France or the liberals in England. One by one the nations fell back into their ancient groove, the Italians sullenly nursing a grievance, the French whipping up a drama of revenge and memory in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, the British "isolating" themselves in virtual control of the Continent, everybody frightened of Russia—and everyone still listening for another word of honest truth from Wilson, who was silent; for America was starting on a long era of isolation from Europe (the first in a century), an aberration in American life, against all its actual traditions, in keeping only with its vulgar oratory.
The Excommunication of Europe
The United States had no obligations to the nations which emerged out of the Treaty of Versailles, only a human obligation to their people to keep faith with them. The people of Germany believed in all fervor that they had gained an armistice and sought peace on the basis of the fourteen points; the people of France and England believed that their own governments had accepted the same points. And the same people might have been stirred to insist on a peace of reconciliation—not with princes and ministers, but with peoples—if Wilson and the Americans had continued to communicate with them.
We withdrew into a stuffy silence. Just as we played a queer game of protocol and refused to "recognize" the USSR, so we sulked because the old bitch Europe wasn't being a gentleman—the only communication we made to Europe was when we dunned her for money. We have seen how the years of Harding and Coolidge affected our domestic life;they were not only a reaction against the fervor of the war months; they were a carefully calculated reaction against basic American policy at home and abroad; they betrayed American enterprise, delivered industry into the hands of finance, degraded government, laughed at corruption, and under the guise of "a return to normalcy" attempted to revive the dead conservatism of McKinley and Penrose in American politics.
In this period, it is no wonder that we failed to utter one kind word to help the first democratic government in Germany, that we trembled with fear of the Reds, sneered at British labor until it became respectable enough to send us a Prime Minister, and excluded more and more rigorously the people of Europe whose blood had created our own.
Slowly, as the depression of 1929-32 squeezed us, we began to see that our miseries connected us with Europe; it was a Republican president who first attempted to address Europe; but Mr. Hoover's temperament makes it difficult for him to speak freely to anyone; the talks with Ramsay MacDonald were pleasurable; the offer of a moratorium was the first kindness to Europe in a generation of studied American indifference. It failed (because France still preferred to avenge herself on Germany); and thereafter we had too many unpleasant things to do at home.
One Good Deed
We had, in the interval, spoken once to all the world. On the day the Japanese moved into Manchuria we had, in effect, notified the British that we chose not to accept the destruction or dismemberment of a friendly nation. The cynical indifference of Sir John Simon was the first intimation of the way Europe felt about American "idealism". It was also the first step toward "non-intervention" in Spain and the destruction of Europe at the hands of Adolf Hitler. When we were rebuffed by Downing Street, we sulked; we did not attempt to speak to the people of Asia, or try to win the Britishpublic to our side. We had lost the habit. We were not even candid in our talks with the Chinese whose cause we favored because we had Japan (and American dealers in oil and scrap iron) to appease.
In 1933 Adolf Hitler was elected leader of a Germany which had been out of communication with us for a generation. The United States which had been in the minds of generations of Germans, was forgotten by the people. In a few years Hitler had overthrown the power of France on the Continent, challenged Communism as an international force, and frightened the British Empire into an ignoble flutter of appeasement.
To that dreary end our failure of communication had tended. We were the one power which might have held Europe together—in a League, in a mere hope of friendship and peace between nations, in the matrix of the fourteen points if nothing more. The moment we withdrew from Europe, its nations fell apart, not merely into victors and vanquished, but into querulous, distrustful, and angry people, each whipped into hysteria by demagogues or soothed to complaisance by frightened ministers.
The obligation to address Europe is no longer a moral one. For our own security, for the cohesion of our own people, for victory over every element that works to break America into hostile parts—now we have the golden opportunity again, to speak to Europe, and to ask Europe to answer. As we look back on our ancient triumphs with the peoples of Europe and the sour end to which we let them come, this new chance is heaven-sent, undeserved, as if we could live our lives over again. And it is nearly so—for if we want to have a life to live in the future, if it is still to be the confident, secure life of a United America, we must speak now to Europe.
What we say to Europe is to be an incitement to revolution, a promise of liberation, a hope of a decent, orderly, comfortable living, in freedom; but it must be as hard and real and un-dreamlike as the Declaration, which was our first word to the people of the world.
We have to begin by telling all the peoples of Europe, our friends and our enemies, what they have done for America, and what America has done for them. We have to destroy the slander that the Italians were kept at digging ditches, the Yugoslavs in the mills, the Hungarians and Poles and Czechs in the mines and at the boilers, the Greeks at the fruit stands; we must destroy the great lie that all the "lesser races" whom Hitler now enslaves were first slaves to our economic system. We can begin by reading the roster of the great names, the men who came to America and were liberated from poverty and prejudice, and made themselves fame or wealth, and deserved well of the Republic, and were honored.
38 Million Freemen
Directly after the great names, we have to tell the story of the nameless ones, the thirty-eight million who came here and suffered the pains of transportation, but took root and grew, understanding freedom as it came to them, making their way in the world, becoming part of America, deprived of no civil rights, fighting against exploitation with other Americans, free to fight against oppression, and with a fair chance of winning.
There is no need to prettify the record; the record, as it stands, in all its crude natural colors, is good enough. The immigrant was exploited, greedily and brutally; and twentyyears later he or his sons exploited other immigrants in turn, as greedily and brutally as the law allowed.
The ancient passions of race and ritual were not dead in America; but they were never embodied into law, nor entirely accepted by custom; and as the unity of America was enriched by the blood of more races and nations, prejudice had to be organized, it had to be whipped up and put on a profit basis, as the Klan did, or it would have died away.
The New World was New
For nearly a hundred and fifty years the peoples of Europe wanted to come to America; they knew, from those who were already here, what the plight of the foreigner was in Pittsburgh or in Tontitown, on Buzzards Bay or Puget Sound. They knew that outlanders were sometimes mocked and often cheated; that work was hard in a new land; that those who came before had chosen the best farms and worked themselves into the best jobs; they knew that for a time life would be strange, and even its pleasures would be alien to them. They knew, in short, that America was not the New Eden; but they also knew that itwasthe New World, which was enough. We have no apologies to make to the immigrant; except for those incivilities which people often show to strangers. Our law showed them nothing but honor and equity. The errors we made were grave enough; but as a nation we never committed the sin of considering an immigrant as an alien first, and then as a man. The economic disadvantages he suffered were the common misfortunes of alien and native alike. We could have gained more from our immigrants if we and they were not in such haste to slough off the culture they brought us. But we can face Europe with a clear conscience.
What we have to say to Europe is not only that "we are all the descendants of immigrants"; we go forward and say that the hunkie, the wop, the bohunk, the big dumb Swede, the yid, the Polack, and all the later immigrants, createdbillions of our wealth, built our railroads and pipe lines and generators and motor cars and highways and telephone systems; and that we are getting our laws, our movies, our dentistry, our poems, our news stories, our truck gardening, and a thousand other necessities of life, from immigrants and from first generation descendants of immigrants; and that they are respected and rewarded, as richly as a child of the DAR or the FFV's would be in the same honored and needed professions; we have to give to Europeans statistical proof of their fellow-countrymen's value to us, and cite the high places they occupy, the high incomes they enjoy, the high honors we give them; all these things are true and have to be said, so that Europe knows why America understands her people, why we can, without smugness or arrogance, talk to all the people of Europe.
And when that is said, we have to say one thing, harder to say honorably and modestly and persuasively:
That all these great things were done because the Europeans who did them were free of Europe, because they had ceased to be Europeans and become Americans.
The Soil of Liberty
This is the true incitement to revolution. Not that nations need Americanize themselves; the image of Freedom has many aspects, and the customs in which freedom expresses itself in France need not be the same as those in Britain or Germany. But the base of freedom is unmistakable—we know freedom as we know pure air, by our instincts, not by formula or definition. And it was the freedom of America which made it possible for forty million men and women to flourish, so that often the Russian and the Irish, the Bulgar and the Sicilian, the Croatian and the Lett, expressed the genius of their country more completely in America than their contemporaries at home; because on the free soil of America, they were not alien, they were not in exile. One can ask what was contributed to medicine by any Japanese whoremained at home, comparable to the work of Noguchi or Takamine in America; or whether any Spaniard has surpassed the clarity of a Santayana; any Czech the scrupulous research of a Hrdlicka; any Hungarian the brilliant, courageous journalism of a Pulitzer; any Serb the achievements of Michael Pupin. The lives of all peoples, all over the world, are incalculably enriched by men set free to work when they came to America, And, it seems, only to America. The warm hospitality of France to men of genius did not always work out; Americans and Russians and Spaniards and English flocked to Paris and became precious, or disgruntled; they felt expatriated; in America men from all over the world felt repatriated, it was here they became normal, and natural, and great.
Beyond this—which deals with great men and is flattering to national pride—we have to say to the men and women of Europe that their own people have created democracy, proving that no European need be a slave. The great lie Hitler is spreading over the world is that there are "countries which love order", and that they are by nature the enemies of the Anglo-Saxon democracies. It is a lie because our democracy was created by all these "order-loving" peoples; America is Anglo-Saxon only in its origin; the answer to Hitler is in what all the people of Europe have created here.
They have also annihilated the myth of race by which Hitler's Germany creates a propaganda of hatred.Allthe peoples of Europe have lived together in amity in America, all have intermarried. Nothing in America—not even its crimes—can be ascribed to one group, nation, or race. Even the KKK, one suspects, was not 100% Aryan.
As the world has seen the German people, for the second time in twenty years, support with enthusiasm a regime of brutal militarism, a sinister retrogression into the bestiality of the Dark Ages, people have wondered whether the German people themselves may not be incapable of civilization. Their eagerness to serve any master sufficiently ignorant, ifthey can brutalize people weaker than themselves, is a pathological strain. Their quick abandonment of the effort at self-government is sub-adolescent. So it seems.