The Limits of Criticism
The pacifists and the isolationists are being punished for their errors if their legitimate emotions are not recognized as part of the natural composition of the American mind. Criticism presents a problem more irritating because it is constantly changing its form and because no principle of action has been evolved.
At one of the grimmest moments of the war, a correspondent of theNew York Timeswrote that "for a while not politics but the war effort appeared to have undergone an 'adjournment'". At another, the President remarked that he did not care whether Democrats or Republicans were elected, provided Congress prosecuted the war energetically, and comment on this was that the President wanted to smash the two-party system, in order to have a non-critical Congress under him as he had had in 1933.
Both of these items suggest, that propaganda has not yet taught us how to criticize our government in war time. The desirable limits of criticism have not been made clear. Every attack on the Administration has been handled as if it were treason; and there has been a faint suggestion of party pride in the achievements of our factories and of our bombers. Neither the war nor criticism of the war can be a party-matter; and no party-matter can be tolerated in the path of the war effort. All Americans know this, but the special application of this loyalty to our present situation has to be clarified. It has been left obscure.
For the question of criticism is connected with the problem of unity in the simplest and most satisfying way. The moment we have unity, we can allow all criticism which rises from any large group of people. Off-center criticism, from small groups, is dangerous. It does not ask questions in the public mind, and its tendency is to divert energies, not to combine them; small groups, if they are not disloyal, are the price we pay for freedom of expression in war time; it isdoubtful whether, at present, any American group can do much harm; it is even a matter of doubt whether Eugene V. Debs or several opposition senators were a graver danger to the armies of the United States in 1917. Small groups may be tolerated or, under law, suppressed; large groups never expose themselves to prosecution, but their criticism is serious and unless it is turned to advantage, it may be dangerous.
The tendency of any executive, in war time, is to consider any criticism as a check on war effort. It is. If a commanding officer has to take five minutes to explain an order, five minutes are lost; if the President, or the head of OPM, has to defend an action or reply to a critic, energy is used up, time is lost. But time and energy may be lost a hundred times more wastefully if the explanation is not given, if the criticism is not uttered and grows internally and becomes suspicion and fear. Freedom of criticism is, in our country, a positive lever for bringing morale into logical relation to events. The victims of criticism can use it positively, their answers can create confidence; and best of all, it can be anticipated, so that it can do no harm.
But this is true only if the right to criticize is subtly transformed into a duty; if, in doing his duty, the citizen refuses to criticize until he is fully informed; if the State makes available to the citizen enough information on which criticism can be based. Then the substance and the intention of criticism become positive factors in our fight for freedom.
Since it is freedom we are fighting for.
Freedom, nothing else, is the source of unity—our purpose in the war, our reason for fighting. On a low level of survival we have forgotten some of our differences and combined our forces to fight because we were attacked; on the high level which makes us a nation we are united to fight for freedom, and this unites us to one another because it unites us with every American who ever fought for freedom. Most particularly our battle today unites us with those who first proclaimed liberty throughout the land.
To distract attention, to put people's minds on useless or bewildering projects is a bit of sabotage, in a total war. It is well enough to divert people, for a moment, so that they are refreshed; but no one has the right to confuse a clear issue or to start inessential projects or to ask people to look at anything except the job in hand.
For five minutes, I propose a look at the Declaration of Independence, because it is the one document essential to our military and moral success; it is the standard by which we can judge the necessity of all projects; and although our destiny, and the means to fulfill it, are written into it, the Declaration is the forgotten document of American history. We remember the phrases too often repeated by politicians and dreamers; we do not study the hard realistic plan of national action embodied in every paragraph of the instrument.
The famous phrases at the beginning give the moral, and revolutionary, reason for action; the magnificent ground plan of the character and history of the American people is explained in the forgotten details of the Declaration; and nothing in the conservative Constitution could do more than delay the unfolding of the plan or divide its fruits a little unevenly.
I suggest that the Declaration supplies themotiveof action for today; the moment we understand it, we have a definition of America, a specific blueprint of what we have been, what we are, and what we can become—and the action necessary for our future evolves from this; moreover the unnecessary action is likewise defined. Our course before we were attacked and our plans for the world after the war may seem the mere play of prejudice and chance; but the destiny ofAmerica will be determined not by the affections of one group or the fears of another, nor by hysteria and passion; our fate will be determined by the whole course of our history—and by our decision to continue its direction or to reverse it.
The rest of this book flows out of this belief in the decisive role of the Declaration, but it does not attempt to indicate a course of action in detail. For the sake of illustration I cite these instances.
Q.Should the U.S. try to democratize the Germans or accept the view that the Germans are a race incapable of self-government?
A.The history of immigration, based on the Declaration, proves that Germans are capable of being good and great democratic citizens.
Q.Can the U.S. unite permanently with any single nation or any exclusive group of nations?
A.Our history, under the Declaration, makes it impossible.
Q.Can the U.S. join a world federation regulating specific economic problems, such as access to raw materials, tariffs, etc.?
A.Nothing in the Declaration is against, everything in our history is for, such a move.
Q.Can the U.S. fight the war successfully without accepting the active principles of the Totalitarian States?
A.If our history is any guide, the only way we canlosethe war is by failing to fight it in our own way.
I have already indicated the possibility that our whole military grand plan must be based on variety, which is the characteristic of America created by specific passages in the Declaration; I am sure that the whole grand plan of civilian unity (the plan of morale and propaganda) has to return to the leading lines of our history, if we want to act quickly, harmoniously and effectively; and the peace we make will be another Versailles, with another Article X in the Covenant, if we make it without returning to the sources of our strength.
So, if we want to win in the field and at home, win the war and the peace, we must be aware of our history and of the principles laid down in 1776 and never, in the long run, betrayed.
To Whom It May Concern
The Declaration is in four parts and all of them have some bearing on the present.
The first explains why the Declaration is issued. The words are so familiar that their significance is gone; but if we remember that days were spent in revision and the effect of every word was calculated, we can assume that there are no accidents, that the Declaration is precise and says what it means. Here is the passage:
"When, in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation."
"When, in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation."
The first official utterance of America is based onhuman necessity—not the necessity of princes or powers.
It is the utterance of a people, not a nation. It invokes first Nature and then Nature's God as lawgivers.
It asks independence and equality—in the same phrase; the habit of nations, to enslave or be enslaved, is not to be observed in the New World.
And finally "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind"; the first utterance of America is addressed not to the nations of the world, but to the men and women who inhabit them.
Human—people—Nature—Nature's God—mankind.
These are the words boldly written across the map of America. A century and a half of change have not robbed one of them of their power—because they were not fad-words,not the catchwords of a revolution; they were words with cold clear meanings—and they destroyed feudalism in Europe for a hundred and sixty years.
The practical application of the preamble is this: whenever we have spoken to the people of other nations, as we did in the Declaration, we have been successful; we have failed only when we have addressed ourselves to governments. The time is rapidly coming when our only communication with Europe must be over the heads of its rulers, to the people. It does not seem practical; but we shall see later that, for us, it has always been good politics.
The Logic of Freedom
The next passage in the Declaration is the one with all the quotations. There can be little harm in reprinting it:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable 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. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experiences hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evidence a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, tothrow off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former System of Government The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world."
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable 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. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experiences hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evidence a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, tothrow off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former System of Government The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world."
Starting off with a rhetorical device—the pretense that its heresies are acceptable commonplaces, this long paragraph builds a philosophy of government on the unproved and inflammatory assumptions which it calls "self-evident". The self-evident truths are, in effect,the terms agreed upon by the signers. These signers now appear for the first time, they say "wehold", they say that, to themselves, certain truths are self-evident. The first three of "these truths" are some general statements about "all men"; the fourth and fifth tell why governments are established and why they should be overthrown. These two are the objective of the first three; but they have been neglected in favor of adolescent disputation over the equality of men at birth, and they have been forgotten in our adult pursuit of happiness which has often made us forget that life and liberty, no less than large incomes, are among our inalienable rights.
The historians of the Declaration always remind us of John Locke's principle that governments exist only to protect property; when States fail they cease to be legitimate, they can be overthrown; and Locke is taken to be, more than Rousseau, the inspiration of the Declaration. The Declaration, it happens, never mentions the right to own property; but the argument for revolution is essentially the same: when a government ceases to function, it should be overthrown. The critical point is the definition of the chief duty of a government. The Colonists, in the Declaration, said it is to securecertain rights to all men; not to guarantee privileges granted by the State, but to protect rights which are born when men are born, in them, with them—inalienably theirs.
So the Declaration sets us for ever in opposition to the totalitarian State—for that State has all the inalienable rights, and the people exist only to protect the State.
The catalogue of rights is comparatively unimportant; once we agree that the State exists to secure inherent rights, the great revolutionary stride has been taken; and immediately we see that our historic opposition to Old Europe is of a piece with our present opposition to Hitler. The purpose of our State is not the purpose of the European States; we might work with them, side by side, but a chemical union would result only in an explosion.
There is one word artfully placed in the description of the State; the Declaration does not say that governments derive their powers from the consent of the governed. It says that governments instituted among men to protect their rights "derive theirjustpowers from the consent of the governed". Always realistic, the Declaration recognizes the tendency of governors to reach out for power and to absorb whatever the people fail to hold. The idea of consent is also revolutionary—but the moment "inalienability" is granted, consent to be governedmustfollow. The fascist state recognizesnoinalienable right, and needs no consent from its people.
It is "self-evident", I think, that we have given wrong values to the three elements involved. We have talked about the "pursuit of happiness"; we have been impressed by the idea of any right being ours "for keeps", inalienable; and we have never thought much about the fundamental radicalism of the Declaration: that it makes government our servant, instructedby usto protect our rights. The chain of reasoning, as the Declaration sets it forth, leads to a practical issue:
All men are created equal—their equality lies in their having rights;these rights cannot be alienated;governments are set up to prevent alienation;power to secure the rights of the people is given by the people to the government;and if one government fails, the people give the power to another.
All men are created equal—their equality lies in their having rights;
these rights cannot be alienated;
governments are set up to prevent alienation;
power to secure the rights of the people is given by the people to the government;
and if one government fails, the people give the power to another.
So in the first three hundred words of the Declaration the purpose of our government is logically developed.
Blueprint of America
There follows first a general and then a particular condemnation of the King of England. This is the longest section of the Declaration. It is the section no one bothers to read; the statute of limitations has by this time outlawed our bill of complaint against George the Third. But the grievances of the Colonials were not high-pitched trifles; every complaint rises out of a definite desire to live under a decent government; and the whole list is like a picture, seen in negative, of the actual government the Colonists intended to set up; and the basic habits of American life, its great traditions, its good fortune and its deficiencies are all foreshadowed in this middle section. Here—for the sake of completeness—is the section:
"He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
"He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained, and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend them.
"He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
"He has called together legislative bodies at places, unusual,uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
"He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
"He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the meantime exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
Here I omit one "count", reserved for separate consideration.
"He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
"He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
"He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.
"He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies, without the Consent of our legislatures.
"He has affected to render the Military Independent of and superior to the Civil power.
"He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation: For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us: For protecting them by a mock Trial from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States: For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world: For depriving us in many cases of the benefits of Trial by jury: For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offenses: For abolishing the free System ofEnglish Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies: For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments: For suspending our own Legislatures and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
"He has abdicated Government here by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
"He has plundered our seas, ravished our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
"He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
"He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
"He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions. In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms. Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people. Nor have We been wanting in attention to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably interrupt ourconnections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends."
The eighteen paragraphs of denunciation fall into seven general sections:
The King has thwarted representative government;he has obstructed justice;he has placed military above civil power;he has imposed taxes without the consent of the taxed;he has abolished the rule of Law;he has placed obstacles in the way of the growth and prosperity of the Colonies;he has, in effect, ceased to rule them, because he is making war on them.
The King has thwarted representative government;
he has obstructed justice;
he has placed military above civil power;
he has imposed taxes without the consent of the taxed;
he has abolished the rule of Law;
he has placed obstacles in the way of the growth and prosperity of the Colonies;
he has, in effect, ceased to rule them, because he is making war on them.
So the bill of complaint signifies these things about the Founders of our Country:
They demanded government with the consent, by the representatives, of the governed.They cherished civil rights, respect for law, and would not tolerate any power superior to law—whether royal or military.They wished for a minimum of civil duties, hated bureaucrats, wanted to adjust their own taxes, and were afraid of the establishment of any tyranny on nearby soil.They wanted free trade with the rest of the world, and no restraints on commerce and industry.They intended to be prosperous.They considered themselves freemen and proposed to remain so.
They demanded government with the consent, by the representatives, of the governed.
They cherished civil rights, respect for law, and would not tolerate any power superior to law—whether royal or military.
They wished for a minimum of civil duties, hated bureaucrats, wanted to adjust their own taxes, and were afraid of the establishment of any tyranny on nearby soil.
They wanted free trade with the rest of the world, and no restraints on commerce and industry.
They intended to be prosperous.
They considered themselves freemen and proposed to remain so.
These were the rights to which lovers of human freedom aspired in England or France; they were the practicalapplication of Locke and Rousseau and the Encyclopedists and the Roundheads. Little in the whole list reflects the special conditions of life in the colonies; troops had been quartered in Ireland, trial by jury suspended in England, tyrants then as now created their Praetorian guard or Storm Troops and placed military above civil rights, and colonies from early time had been considered as tributaries of the Mother Country.
The Practical "Dream"
The American Colonists were about to break the traditions of European settlement, and with it the traditions of European government. And, with profound insight into the material conditions of their existence, they foreshadowed the entire history of our country in the one specification which had never been made before, andcouldnever have been made before:
"He has endeavored to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands."
This amazing paragraph is placed directly after the sections on representative government; it is so important that it comes before the items on trial by jury, taxation, and trade. It is a critical factor in the history of America; if we understand it, we can go forward to understand our situation today. The other complaints point toward our systems of law, our militia, our constant rebellion against taxes, our mild appreciation of civil duties, our unswerving insistence upon the act of choosing representatives; all these are details; but this unique item indicates how the nation was to be built and what its basic social, economic, and psychological factors were to be.
This brief paragraph condemns the Crown for obstructing the two processes by which America was made:
ImmigrationPioneering
With absolute clairvoyance the Declaration sets Naturalization, which means political equality, in between the two other factors. Naturalization is the formal recognition of the deep underlying truth, the new thing in the new world, that one couldbecomewhat one willed and worked to become—one could, regardless of birth or race or creed,become an American.
So long as the colonies were held by the Crown, the process of populating the country by immigration was checked. The Colonists had no "dream" of a great American people combining racial bloods and the habits of all the European nations. They wanted only to secure their prosperity by growing; they constantly were sending agents to Westphalia and the Palatinate to induce good Germans to come to America, one colony competing with another, issuing pamphlets in Platt-Deutsch, promising not Utopia with rivers of milk and honey, not a dream, but something grander and greater—citizenship, equality under the law, and land. Across this traffic the King and his ministers threw the dam of Royal Prerogative; they meant to keep the colonies, and they knew they could not keep them if men from many lands came in as citizens; and they meant to keep the virgin lands from the Appalachians to the Mississippi—or as much of it as they could take from the Spaniards and the French. So as far back as 1763, the Crown took overalltitle to the 250,000 square miles of land which are now Indiana and Illinois and Michigan and Minnesota, the best land lying beyond the Alleghenies. Into this territory no man could enter; none could settle; no squatters' right was recognized; no common law ran. Suddenly the natural activity of America, uninterrupted since1620, stopped. The right of Americans to move westward and to take land, the right of non-Americans to become Americans, both were denied. The outcry from the highlands and the forest clearing was loud; presently the seaboard saw that America was one country, its true prosperity lay within its own borders, not across the ocean. And to make the unity clear, the Crown which had taken the land, now took the sea; the trade of the Colonies was broken; they were cut off from Europe, forbidden to bring over its men, forbidden to send over their goods. For the first time America was isolated from Europe.
So the British Crown touched every focal spot—and bruised it. The outward movement, to and from Europe, always fruitful for America, was stopped; the inward movement, across the land, was stopped. The energies of America had always expressed themselves in movement; when an artificial brake on movements was applied, friction followed; then the explosion of forces we call the Revolution.
And nothing that happened afterward could effectively destroy what the Revolution created. The thing that people afterward chose to call "the American dream" was no dream; it was then, and it remained, the substantial fabric of American life—a systematic linking of free land, free trade, free citizenship, in a free society.
A grim version of our history implies that the pure idealism of the Declaration was corrupted by the rich and well-born who framed the Constitution. As Charles Beard is often made the authority for this economic interpretation, his own account of the economic effects of the Declaration may be cited in evidence:
the great estates were broken up;the hold of the first-born and of the dead-hand were equally broken;in the New States, the property qualification was never accepted and it disappeared steadily from the old.
the great estates were broken up;
the hold of the first-born and of the dead-hand were equally broken;
in the New States, the property qualification was never accepted and it disappeared steadily from the old.
And the Ordnance of 1787, last great act of the Continental Congress, inspired by the Declaration, created the Northwest Territory, the heart of America for a hundred years, in a spirit of love and intelligence which the Constitution in all its wisdom did not surpass.
That is what the Declaration accomplished. It set in actionallthe forces that ultimately made America. The action rose out of the final section, in which, naming themselves for the first time as "Representatives of the United States of America", the signers declare that "these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States...." In this clear insight, the Declaration says that the things separating one people from another have already happened—differences in experiences, desires, habits—and that the life of the Colonies is already so independent of Britain that the purely political bond must be dissolved.
"WE, THEREFORE, the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions do, in the Name, and by authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be, Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. 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."
"WE, THEREFORE, the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions do, in the Name, and by authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be, Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. 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."
So finally, as a unity of free and independent States, the new nation arrogates to itself four specific powers:
To levy warconclude peacecontract alliancesestablish commerce.
Only these four powers, by name; the rest were lumped together, a vast, significant et cetera; but these were so much more significant that they had to be separately written down; three of them—war—peace—alliances—are wholly international; the fourth, commerce, at least partly so. The signers of the Declaration made no mistake; they wished to be independent; and in order to remain independent, they were fightingagainstisolation.
The error we must not make about the Declaration is to think of it as a purely domestic document, dealing with taxes and election of representatives and Redcoats in our midst; it is the beginning of our national, domestic life, but only because it takes the rule of our life out of English hands; and the moment this is done, the Declaration sets us up as an independent nation among other nations, and places us in relation, above all, to the nations of Europe.
At this moment our intercourse with the nations of Europe is a matter of life and death—death to the destroyer of free Europe or death to ourselves; but if we live, life for all Europe, also. Like parachute troops, our address to Europe must precede our armies; we have to know what to say to Europe, to whom to say, how to say it. And the answer was provided by the Declaration which let all Europe come to us—but held us independent of all Europe.
In the back of our minds we have an image labeled "the immigrant"; and it is never like ourselves. The image has changed from generation to generation, but it has never been accurate, because in each generation it is a political cartoon, an exaggeration of certain features to prove a point. We have to tear up the cartoon; then we can get back to the picture it distorts.
English-Speaking Aliens
The immigrant-cartoon since 1910 has been the South-European: Slavic, Jewish, Italian; usually a woman with a shawl over her head, her husband standing beside her, with slavic cheekbones or a graying beard; and eager children around them. This is not a particularly false picture of several million immigrants; among them some of the most valuable this country has had. But it erases from our mind the bare statistical fact that the largest single language group, nearlyone third of allthe immigrants to the United States, were English-speaking. For several decades, the bulk of all immigration was from Great Britain and Ireland. If one takes the three principal sources of immigration for every decade between 1820 and 1930, one finds that Germany and Ireland were among the leaders for sixty years; Italy for forty; Russia only thirty; the great Scandinavian movement to the middle west lasted a single decade; but Great Britain was one of the chief sources of immigration for seventy years, and probably was the principal source for thirty years more—from 1790 until 1820—during which time no official figures were kept.
Out of thirty-eight million arrivals in this country, abouttwelve spoke the dominant tongue, and most of them were aware of the tradition of Anglo-Saxon self-government; some had suffered from British domination, more had enjoyed the fruits of liberty; but all knew what liberty and respect for law meant. Many of these millions fled from poverty; but most were not refugees from religious or political persecution. Many millions came to relatives and friends already established; and began instantly to add to the wealth of the country; many millions were already educated. The cost of their upbringing had been borne abroad; they came here grown, trained, and willing to work. They fell quickly into the American system, without causing friction; they helped to continue the dominance of the national groups which had fought the Revolution and created the new nation.
It is important to remember that they were, none the less, immigrants; they made themselves into Americans and helped to make America; they helped to make us what we are by keeping some of their habits, by abandoning others. For this is essential: the British immigrant, even when he came to a country predominantly Anglo-Saxon, did not remain British and did not make the country Anglo-Saxon. The process of change affected the dominant group as deeply as it affected the minorities. It was a little easier for a Kentish man to become an American than it was for a Serbian; but it was just as hard for the man from Kent to remain a Briton as it was for the Serbian to remain a Serb. Both became Americans. Neither of them tried to remake America in the mold of his old country.
Who Asked Them to Come?
The next image in our minds is a bad one for us to hold because it makes us feel smug and benevolent. It is the image of America, the foster-mother of the world, receiving first the unfortunate and later the scum of the old world. It is true that the oppressed came to America, and that in the forty million arrivals there were criminals as well as saints. The pictureis false not only in perspective, but in basic values. For in many generations, at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end of the great inrush of Europeans, the United States actively desired and solicited immigration.
Obviously when people were eager to emigrate, the solicitation fell off; Irish famine and German reaction sent us floods of immigrants who had not been individually urged to come. But their fathers and elder brothers had been invited. The Colonies and the States in their first years wanted settlers and, as noted, wrote their need for new citizens into the Declaration; between two eras of hard times we built the railroads of the country and imported Irish and Chinese to help the Civil War veterans lay the ties and dig the tunnels; in the gilded age and again at the turn of the century, we were enormously expanding and again agents were busy abroad, agents for land companies, agents for shipping, agents for great industries which required unskilled labor.
Moreover, the Congress of the United States refused to place any restrictions upon immigration. The vested interest of labor might demand restrictions; but heavy industry loved the unhappy foreigner (the nearest thing to coolie labor we would tolerate) and made it a fixed policy of the United States not to discourage immigration. The only restriction was a technical one about contract labor. It did not lower the totals.
America Was Fulfilment!
The moment we have corrected the cartoon we can go back to fact without self-righteousness. The fact is that arrival in America was the end toward which whole generations of Europeans aspired. It did not mean instant wealth and high position; but it did mean an end to the only poverty which is degrading—the poverty which is accepted as permanent and inevitable. The shock of reality in the strike-ridden mills around Pittsburgh, on the blizzard-swept plains of the Dakotas, brought dismay to many after the gaudy promisesmade by steamship agents and labor bosses. But in one thing America never failed its immigrants—the promise and hope of better things for their children. America was not only promises; America was fulfilment.
No one has measured the exact dollar-and-cents value of believing that the next generation will have a chance to live better, in greater comfort and freedom. In America this belief in the future was only a projection of the parallel belief in the present; it was a reaction against the European habit of assuming that the children would, with luck, be able to live where their parents lived, on the same income, in the same way. The elder son was fairly assured of this; war and disease and colonies and luck would have to take care of the others. The less fortunate, the oppressed, could not even hope for this much. At various times the Jew in Russia, the liberal in Germany, the Sicilian sulphur-miner, the landless Irish, and families in a dozen other countries could only expect a worse lot for their children; they had to uproot themselves and if they themselves did not stand transplanting, they were sure their children would take root in the new world.
And this confidence—which was always justified—became as much a part of the atmosphere of America as our inherited parliamentary system, our original town-meetings, our casual belief in civil freedom, our passion for wealth, our habits of movement, and all the other essential qualities which describe and define us and set us apart from all other nations.
The immigrant knew his children would be born Americans; for himself there was a more difficult and in some ways more satisfying fate: he couldbecomean American. It was not a cant phrase; it had absolute specific meaning. The immigrant became in essence one of the people of the country.
As soon as he was admitted, he had the same civil rights as the native; within a few years he could acquire all the basic political rights; and neither the habits of the people nor the laws of the government placed anything in the way of social equality; the immigrant's life was his own to make.
This did not mean that the immigrant instantly ceased to be a Slav or Saxon or Latin any more than it meant that he ceased to be freckled or brunette. The immigrant became a part of American life because the life of America was prepared to receive him and could not, for six generations, get along without him.
America Is Various
During the years in which big business solicited immigration and organized labor attacked it, the argument about the immigrant took an unfortunate shift. The question was whether the melting pot was "working", whether immigrants could be Americanized. There were people who worried if an immigrant wore a shawl, when "old Americans" were wearing capes; (the "old Americans" wore shawls when they arrived, forty years earlier); it was "unfortunate" if new arrivals spoke with an "accent" different from the particular American speech developed at the moment. There were others who worried if an immigrant too quickly foreswore the costume or customs of his native land. Employers of unskilled labor liked to prevent superficial Americanization; sometimes immigrants were kept in company villages, deliberately isolated from earlier arrivals and native Americans; wages could be kept low so long as the newcomers remained at their own level of comfort, not at ours. Others felt the danger (foreseen by Franklin and Jefferson) of established groups, solidified by common memories, living outside the circle of common interests. The actual danger to the American system was that it wouldn't work, that immigrants coming in vast numbers would form separate bodies, associated not with America but with their homeland. (This is precisely what happened in Argentina, by the deliberate action of the German government, and it is not an invention of Hitler's. Thomas Beer reports that "in 1892 ... a German imperialist invited the Reichstag to secure the ... dismemberment of the United States by planting colonies of civilized Europeans"within our borders, colonies with their own religious leaders, speaking their own language; German leaders never could accept the American idea of change; in Hitler's mind a mystic "blood" difference makes changing of nationality impossible.)
The first World War proved that the "new immigrants", the masses from South Europe, as well as the Germans, could keep their ancient customs and be good Americans; then observers saw that their worries over "assimilation" were beside the point; because the essence of America's existence was to create a unity in which almost all variety could find a place—not to create a totality brooking no variation, demanding uniformity. In the flush of the young century William James, as typical of America as Edison or Theodore Roosevelt, looking about him, seeing an America made up of many combining into one, made our variety the base of his religious outlook. He had studied "the varieties of religious experience", and he began, experimentally, to think of a universe not necessarily totalitarian. He saw us building a country out of diverse elements and found approval in philosophy. He saw infinite change; "it would have depressed him," said a cynical and admiring friend, "if he had had to confess that any important action was finally settled"; just as it would have depressed America to admit that the important action of creating America had come to an end. James "felt the call of the future"; he believed that the future "could be far better, totally other than the past". He was living in an atmosphere of transformation, seeing men and women becoming "far better, totally other" than they had been. He looked to a better world; he helped by assuring us that we need never have one King, one ruler, one fixed and unalterable fate. He said that there was no proof of the one single Truth. He threw out all the old totalitarians, and cast his vote for a pluralistic universe. We were building it politically every day; without knowing it, James helped to fortify us against the totalitarians who were yet to come.
This was, to be sure, not Americanization. It was the far more practical thing: becoming American. Americanization was something celebrated on "days"; it implied something to be donetothe foreigners. The truth was that the immigrant needed only one thing, to be allowed to experience America; then slowly, partially, but consistently, he became an American. The immigrant of 1880 did not become an American of the type of 1845; he became an American as Americans were in his time; in every generation the mutual experience of the immigrant, naturalized citizens and native born, created the America of the next generation. And in every generation, the native born and the older immigrants wept becausetheirAmerica and their way of becoming American had been outmoded. The process passed them by; America had to be reborn.
So long as the immigrant thought of "taking out citizen papers" and the native born was annoyed by accents, odd customs, beards and prolific parenthood, the process of becoming American was not observed, and the process of Americanization seemed obvious and relatively unimportant.
The tremendous revolution in human affairs was hidden under social discords and economic pressures. People began to think it was time to slacken the flow of immigrants until we had absorbed what we had. Good land was scarce; foreigners in factions began to join unions; second-generation children grew up to be great tennis players and took scholarships; the pure costless joy of having immigrants do the dirty work was gone. The practical people believed something had to be done.
But the practical people forgot the great practical side—which is also the mystical side—of our immigration. For the first time since the bright days of primitive Christianity, a great thing was made possible to all men: they could become what they wished to become. As Peter said to the Romans, and Paul to the Athenians, that through faith and desire and grace they could become Christians, equal, in the eyes ofGod, to all other Christians, so the apostles of Freedom spoke to the second son of an English Lord, to the ten sons of a Russian serf, to old and young, ignorant and wise, befriended or alone, and said that their will, their ambition, their work, and their faith could make of them true Americans.
The instant practical consequences of this new element in human history are incalculable. They are like the practical consequences of early Christianity, which can be measured in terms of Empires and explorations and Crusades. The transformation of millions of Europeans into Americans was like the conversion of millions of pagans to Christianity; it was accompanied by an outburst of confidence and energy. The same phenomena occurred in the Renaissance and Reformation, a period of conversion accompanied by a great surge of trade, invention, exploration, wealth, and vast human satisfaction.
This idea of becoming American, as personal as religion, as mystical as conversion, as practical as a contract, was in fact a foundation stone of the growth and prosperity of the United States. It was a practical result of the exact kind of equality which the Declaration invoked; it allowed men to regain their birthright of equality, snatched from them by tyrants. It persuaded them that they could enjoy life—and allowed them to produce and to consume. In that way it was as favorable to prosperity as our land and our climate. And it had other consequences. For, as it stemmed from equality, it went deep under the roots of the European system—and loosened them so that a tremor could shake the system entirely.