CHAPTER IIIThe Native American
I find the future of America a far more hopeful and beautiful thing to contemplate from the trenches of a new subway than from a Fifth Avenue bus. Perhaps it is because in one is seen the raw material of hopes, ideals, and ambitions in the making,—a people eagerly looking forward; while in the other these ideals are already fashioned, perhaps discarded,—a people looking backward. I am not more afraid of the ignorant vote than of the absent vote; of the discontented alien than of the satisfied American; of the hungry laborer than of the surfeited idler; of the casual laborer than of the overworked industrial captain; of the patient, plodding hand toiler than of the dreamer of the get-rich-quick concerns; of the alien with the family back home than of the American with no familyat all. They all go to make up one America.
When we think of a united America, our minds naturally turn to Americanizing the immigrant. Big as that task is, I do not believe that our greatest difficulty lies with him. Rather I fear that we shall have to Americanize our native Americans first—in increased respect for the flag, in conscious renewed allegiance to America, in the patriotic use of the nation’s holidays, in measures of national service. We have, I think, to return to the civilian training camp and universal service as a melting pot for natives before we can make America a successful melting pot for aliens.
The average native American is local, provincial, self-interested, constitutionally opposed to any change that may threaten his particular established local order. The average native employer looks askance at anything that may upset his labor supply, be that a shop census or workmen’s compensation. The average native employee does not take to such new-fangled ideas as health insurance and promotion based on record. It is thenative-born American woman who crosses to the American side of the street and who still meets and discusses the immigrant as a problem. I suspect it was a native American who dubbed the Italians “dagoes,” the Hungarians, “hunkies,” the Lithuanians “round heads,” and so on. There is no better invention for prolonging personal conflict than derisive nicknames, and America seems to have done its share in this direction.
It is natural that those who carry responsibilities should be conservative, but the native American seems to me to carry this responsibility to the verge of reaction and antagonism. I am reminded of a time when I had occasion to summon an employer and employee before me for a hearing upon a wage dispute and was reminded that it was presumption to set the employee opposite the employer to discuss such a trivial matter on equal terms. I am constantly asked to entertain women’s clubs who find immigration “interesting,” but whose members shrink from the neighborly services which they might render in their own communities.
There are always many exceptions toany general statement. But this does not alter the fact that the native American has a point of view, a state of mind, a prejudiced observance, a sense of superiority—which makes him greatly in need of Americanization. This is acquired by the native boy and girl early in life. What opportunity has the average native-born boy and girl to learn about American citizenship and its duties and rights? The public and parochial schools give little more than history and an indifferent kind of civil government, which seems to us as we learn it to have little to do with us or our future. Our patriotic days are largely holidays from school, filled with fun and pranks, but rarely with any sense of their real significance. They seem to have nothing to do with the very freedom we enjoy on those days. The boy becomes a voter by the mere act of registering his name. The average girl is unconscious that she everbecomesa citizen unless she is interested in suffrage or anti-suffrage, or unless practical property questions arise. We can hardly expect under these conditions much realization of what nationalism means, orthat a call to national service will meet with much response. The surprising thing is that in spite of our official neglect and indifference, youths are filled with patriotism and desire to serve, if it can be utilized before the shop and home absorb all their energies.
I believe that a really careful, impartial analysis of our situation to-day would reveal two things: that there are two main systems of thought and lines of activity upon which the hope and future of America depend—one is government and the other is business. They alone have a nation-wide organization, whose units reach every American community and every American resident. To the government we look for law, order, education, justice, and the essentials of community life; to the industry for the job or the market which gives life to the community.Go where you will, in the last analysis a native American controls the situation.The man higher up, if you go high enough, is invariably a native-born American. It is said that there are more native-born sons of Connecticut in Oregon than in Connecticut, but the great industriesof Connecticut that set the pace for the state are in the hands of native Americans. So it is with government. Minor offices, sometimes even important offices, are in the hands of naturalized citizens, but usually with the consent or approval of some native American—sometimes far removed from the scene of action.
The radius of this native American influence bears no relation to numbers. It encompasses the school, the home, the neighborhood, the personal life of the resident. We fill our night schools by adjusting them to the industrial organization and securing its coöperation. We fill our civilian training camps by the coöperation of employers in granting absences and paying wages. We obtain a common standard of living by enforcement of laws that set the standard. Civic and philanthropic agencies may be the pioneers, the educators, the balance restorers; they can care for the waste and discover causes. But America has too long regarded them as the unifiers of its many peoples, as the makers of citizens. We now know that this task comes squarely back to the political andindustrial leader and to no other; to the native born and to no other.
America is the proud possessor of some significant and far-reaching illusions which make a poor foundation for the structures it is seeking to build. Chief among these is the assertion that the immigrant lowers the American standard of living. In the final analysis it is America that lowers the immigrant’s own standard of living. A double standard of living is imposed upon the immigrant by the responsible native American.
Of the many hundreds of immigrant communities which I have studied, I recall none in which American ideals were being aggressively menaced by immigrants who were determined to have none of them. Isolation, betrayal of our own minimum social and civic standards, these I have seen over and over again. But always the immigrant population has been the weaker force in any given community. There are in the country to-day hundreds of towns, say of 1500 population, in which the foreign born number one half. But in civic strength, social influence, and politicalpower, the immigrant 50 per cent measures less than 10 per cent. In the census they appear as towns of 1500. In reality the native-born residents of these towns consider them as towns of about 500—with an unfortunate though necessarily large annex of immigrant workmen and their families who live “on the other side of the railroad” or in some other segregated spot—to which fire and water systems, garbage collections and calling do not penetrate. Now there can be no doubt that that large “annex” is a menace to the future of America. But it is a menace produced by American neglect, not by immigrant aggression and malevolence.
We shall never solve the immigration problem so long as we begin with the immigrant’s shortcomings, nor shall we attain Americanism so long as we define it as nativism. We need not fear that we are not as much in control as we ever were. We set the standards. The question is whether we have cause to be satisfied with the way in which we do it. The ideals and standards of America are set by the American born to-day just asthey were in our early history. In all communities which I have studied the American-born residents or employers are the determining factors. The citizen may send you through many devious channels, to see this boss and that boss, to win friends for your cause from this foreign-born leader or that immigrant saloon-keeper, but eventually you deal with a native American, not with an alien.
Mr.Ross, in the “Old World in the New,” points to a typical Western town of 26,000 inhabitants, 10,000 of them immigrants, and gives a picture of the vice, intemperance, bad housing, and wretched standards of living resulting in this town from the immigrant population. We in America believe in majority rule. There was a safe margin of 6000 Americans in that town, free to establish and insist upon any standard they chose. Why were the Americans beaten in the struggle? Because here as in many places they ignored or definitely isolated the immigrants, permitting them to work all day with Americans at the mills or factories where they were needed, and then encouraging or compelling them tospend all the rest of their time in their own corner of the town, and to encroach no more than necessary upon the respectable streets and schools and churches and recreations of the American section.
Persecuted America! Miss Repplier, lamenting the immigrant invasion of Philadelphia, in theAtlantic Monthlynot long ago, presents a truly colonial point of view concerning the suffering wrought by the twentieth-century world of America in this colonial stronghold. In the mind of Miss Repplier and many thousands of Americans the long-suffering American, heir of all the ages, legatee of all the best traditions of liberty and opportunity sealed in 1776, is now driven like sheep before the advancing immigrant hordes:
“Dirt is a valuable asset in the immigrant’s hands. With its help he drives away decent neighbors, and brings property down to his level and his purse. The ill-fated Philadelphian is literally pushed out of his home—the only place, sighs Mrs. Pennell, where he wants to live—by conditions that he is unable to avert, and unwilling, as well as unfitted, to endure.”
“Dirt is a valuable asset in the immigrant’s hands. With its help he drives away decent neighbors, and brings property down to his level and his purse. The ill-fated Philadelphian is literally pushed out of his home—the only place, sighs Mrs. Pennell, where he wants to live—by conditions that he is unable to avert, and unwilling, as well as unfitted, to endure.”
Old Philadelphians that would never have run from an Indian, that would have conquered the forests and spanned the rivers, run from the Italian and the Pole. Alas! We too have deteriorated. We see nothing dramatic, we feel no challenge, in the fight to raise the standards of our less fortunate neighborhoods. We cannot find any inspiration in that ideal of justice which insists on law enforcement equally among all residents of a neighborhood. Is there nothing to be said on behalf of the neighborly, friendly visiting which would soon make dirt as unfashionable in the immigrant’s as in the Philadelphian’s home? The reason that the tenement fire escapes are cluttered in Rivington Street and free on Fifth Avenue is not, as we fondly suppose, that immigrants prefer fire escapes draped with bedding and pillows and children. The answer is that they move to Fifth Avenue as soon as their income permits and as fast as they learn how well it is possible to live in America.
Let us take a town in the making and see if the standards do not come back to some native American. Take, for instance,the towns that have grown up during the war-order prosperity, which is typical of our town building in the past in America. American capital, directed by native-American enterprise and brains, selects a site and builds a model factory, secures the necessary transportation facilities and puts in its power and machines. Anything else? Yes, the skilled labor market is scarce of men, so a few good houses are put up for skilled workmen, upon whom the operation of the plant depends.
As for the mass of foreign-born unskilled workmen, relying upon a well-stocked market, no provision is made for housing, sanitation, or other care of them. This is left to the individual workman and to the speculator. When a cluster of huts, tents, or bunk houses spring up, is it because the immigrant prefers the huts or tents, or is it because the only power to create standards—the native-American power—has ignored its obligation?
It is the same with contract work. The contractor, in figuring the cost of road building, includes not only materials, grades, etc., but the cost of decent housingfor his American workmen. The immigrant workman he leaves to the padrone. The padrone is one of the most anti-American forces in this country, and he exists only by the grace of the native-born American employer. No immigrant body can impose him upon an employer who does not find him useful.
I am invariably met with the fact that native Americans refuse to rent to immigrants because of their alleged defacement of property. The one remedy seems to be eviction and refusal to rent. I have not yet found that a limitation on boarders in the rental clause has been tried or that any effort has been made to teach these tenants the meaning and methods of an American standard of living. I have not found that such conveniences as an adequate and accessible water supply, garbage collection, prompt repairs, and interest in the well-being of the tenants bear in the mind of the landlord much relation to care of person and property. The native American thinks of the immigrant tenant as an inferior human being, used to something quite different, and almost unconsciouslybrings the American standard down to his own idea of the immigrant’s capacities.
There are, of course, many people—not confined to immigrants—who are indifferent to or incapable of maintaining an American standard of living. Eliminating these, I believe that the native American can and must set the standard, pay decent enough wages to make it possible, and then admit no excuses whatever for non-performance. In my judgment it is a fallacy to suppose that increased wages and shorter hours alone will Americanize America, unless there goes with these things some education as to their use.
Paternalism? I have in mind a steel mill where the employer has increased wages 50 per cent, and established eight-hour shifts; where the most perfect conditions prevail in his plant, where his first-aid and safety-first work are excellent. He believes that to build company houses would be paternalism. Almost every one in the town works in his mill. He has added 5000 workmen to the village within a year. No private capitalwill take the risk of building houses for his war industry. His men sleep 5 to 15 in a room, often on the floor and in their clothing; they have no care and eat badly prepared food. They crowd family houses, destroying privacy and morality. That plant employed last year 34,000 men to keep an average of 15,000. This registers the immigrant’s protest,—the only one possible,—moving on. Yet one native-born American controls the health, decency, morality, and efficiency of some 8000 immigrant workmen whose only protest is to move on, and whose only future is high enough wages to return to his home country.
And the worst of it is that men get used to these conditions, believing them to be American, and with this belief go the dreams, the visions, and ambitions which are the essence of good citizenship. The prospective good citizen is sacrificed to the demand for cheap labor which is a native-American demand. For the few hundreds of men that are indifferent to or incapable of appreciating an American standard of living thousands aresacrificed daily at the hearth of the indifferent, complacent native American who thinks of them only as cogs in his machine and rarely as future citizens of America.
There is no more representative class of native Americans in the popular mind than those bearing old family names. The youth of America read and store up all the available information about them and aim to duplicate their achievements in dress, manner, entertainments, and work. And yet I can take you to any one of the great estates that they occupy, and if they employ immigrant labor, you will find it housed in miserable shacks, lacking the decencies and comforts of an American standard of living. You will find that the native Americans had these shacks put up and receive rent for them. You will find also that the immigrant has but one choice, to leave his job if he wants something better. Ask yourself, as an American with a family dependent upon you, whether you would have the courage to make this choice. I have in mind as I write a most exclusive club which is the wonder of the HudsonValley for sheer beauty and order; and I see below the railroad track its thousand employees who toil all day to produce that beauty, housed in wretched frame buildings in bad repair and crowded with boarders because there are not enough houses. I find there the future citizens of America being brought up without regard to decency and morality, living 5 to 10 in a room, while the little native-born boy or girl in the clubhouses has a room and a bath to himself. Now this difference is not alone the difference of wealth. It goes deeper than that. The club owns the workmen’s houses; it gets an adequate return on its investment. The trouble is the native American does not regard the immigrant as anything but a workman—and so long as he ignores America’s interest in that man as a citizen, as a defender of America, as a voter, as a future taxpayer, he is anti-American. To these men, preaching patriotism and freedom in America must seem the height of insincerity when contemplated from overcrowded rooms under a leaky roof. Last Fourth of July the National AmericanizationCommittee instituted “Americanization Day” when native-born citizens tendered receptions to foreign-born citizens. When foreign-born men wrote saying that although they had been here many years it was the first time they had shaken hands with an American, it demonstrated how wide is the gulf of our prejudice and its consequent neglect. The pay envelope has made a poor melting pot, and America is to-day paying the cost of an experiment that has failed. Whenever we have established lines that make our native Americans inaccessible to our foreign-born residents, there we have established the unknown quantity in fixing the responsibility for the immigrant standard of living, without which knowledge the truth can never be ascertained.
What I am urging is this: Before we assert so calmly that the immigrant lowers the American standard of living let us rest our case with the man higher up—if need be with the financier who supplies the capital and requires that all material conditions must be right, but who forgets that in the last analysis the success of any enterprise depends uponloyal, efficient workmen with a home stake in America.
Another native-American illusion is that the immigrant will not appreciate our efforts. Since when has America based its principles of action upon the flimsy desire for appreciation? Furthermore we expect the appreciation to be out of all proportion to what we do. We have indeed deteriorated when we have come to regard simple acts of justice, fair play, service, obligation, and duty as acts to be persisted in only when the immigrant is duly appreciative! Such a stimulus would have done little to develop the northwest and to conquer the resources of the country. The man who hesitates to build houses for his homeless or commuting workmen because it may be paternalism, closes the club-house he has provided because it is not appreciated, or bewails his empty playground as a species of rank ingratitude. A great weakness of the American character to-day is its desire for appreciation and credit, and it does not make for Americanism.
A third American illusion is that thenative American always thinks of the immigrants as getting something from America—wages or liberty or opportunity or rights. We forget that the majority of them come to us as laborers, representing a net contribution of at least $1000, which is the cost of raising a native-born child to the productive age. In these days of prosperity, of new vision in business, of expansion marked by a remarkable greatness of spirit, it is no time to forget that the very industries which are at present by way of putting America in the front ranks of trade and commerce are dependent upon immigrant labor.
We know in a general way that the immigrant is the possessor of much brawn and muscle. But it is characteristic of us that we think of him always as ajob hunter, not as a producer. His may be the opportunity; but we never reflect that ours may be the profit. The big mine owner, the subway contractor, the chief engineer of the railroads, the canal builder have a practical knowledge of just where, and how largely, the immigrant comes into new America’s scheme.But the average American has no grasp of the full significance of the immigrant’s immediate and present service to him and to the nation, in a purely present and industrial way.
He knows that a big army of immigrants armed with pick and shovel is down there in the subway cavity; and he knows that they build the roads over which he spins his motor. Still he does not really grasp the fact that the railroad that carries him, the clothes he wears, the cigars he smokes, the furniture he puts in his house are made by immigrant hands. Take iron and steel, the strategic industry, so to speak, in America to-day. The Federal Immigration Commission found that 57.7 per cent of the workmen in this industry were foreign born; and if you add the workmen of foreign-born parentage, the percentage mounts to 71.7. And so it goes through a long list of essential industries—in sugar refining, 85 per cent of the workmen are foreign born; in bituminous coal mining, 61.9 per cent; and so on. And there is no one to take his place. There are to-day three jobs forevery two workmen, and we are calling out our reserve of women who have never before worked for wages. We often hear of the displaced American workmen, but when we look for them, we generally find they have moved up in the economic scale.
What other value are immigrants in American life?What percentage do they possess of the social opportunity and liberty of America? What percentage do they contribute to it? What percentage are they permitted to contribute to it?
Some immigrants come to us with racial powers, instincts, and susceptibilities, which, however modified by years of peasant toil, have great potential value for America. Some come to us with vision trained for centuries in beauty of line and color, with the skilled hands of races that have been shaping arch or temple or cathedral for thousands of years. They feel beauty and mobility of outline as only those feel them who have lived with them for generations. What becomes of these capacities over here? Does America give immigrants the chanceto use them? Does America even know they exist?
Another illusion is that the present races coming to America are not easily assimilated, and should they be, they would give America an undesirable type.
What, after all, is Americanism? What is the destiny of America? What do we want it to be? What, in the great evolution of nations, is it bound to be? Until the average American meets and answers these questions squarely, we cannot settle the question of what races are best for the future of America. Miss Repplier quotesDr.Horace Kallen as saying, “Only men who are alike in origin and spirit and not abstractly can be truly equal, and maintain that inward unanimity of action and outlook which makes a national life.” And, says Miss Repplier, rightly, “We have no mutual understanding, no common denominator.”
We have not. The first Americans whose opportunity, yes, and whoseresponsibilityit was to produce these, have failed ignominiously to do so. “An Englishman,” says Miss Repplier, “knows that a Russian Jew cannot in five yearsor in twenty-five years become English; that his standards and ideals are not convertible into English standards and ideals. A Frenchman does not see in a Bulgarian or a Czech the making of another Frenchman.”
True, but what is an American? Is he an Anglo-Saxon racial type, and if so, by what law?Do we desire him to be this?
I do not despise the conclusion of ethnologists, but they seem to have so few conclusions and so many theories. And the root of them seems to be, not experience, but apprehension. Meanwhile, I see all around me valiant Americans, Southern European by birth and tradition, Americans now in spirit and loyalty andtendency. These men and women have mastered the opportunity—for they had to seek and improve it themselves—to become assimilated. In spite of the thousands of their countrymen among us, still un-American, I am convinced of two things: That Americacan control its own destiny, that one of the greatest obstacles has been slothful neglect, another obstacle, nativism; and that the way to attain control of ourdestiny is by aggressive, not passive, Americanism. When this is under way, it will be easy enough to sort out and deal separately and finally with undesirable races and types or those that have no desire to become Americans.
In the midst of all our discussion of to-day about a prepared America, there is no national policy emerging. We see Congress half-heartedly bolstering up the army and navy. We see the Federal Bureau of Immigration without adequate authority at work upon a Federal system of employment exchanges, a system which can be overturned by successors in office. We see the Bureau of Naturalization at work on a citizenship program into which it jumps without preparation, preëmpting a field long occupied by its neighbor in the Interior Department, the Bureau of Education, without a suggestion of real coöperation. We see the Bureau of Education with an unlimited field before it, hampered by state lines and no funds. We have laws demanding that an alien shall learn English and have a knowledge of the Constitution in order to becomea citizen, yet leaving it to the ward boss to supply the information. We see the various departments dealing with various phases of preparedness pursuing a path of departmental routine, waste, and duplication. No clear uniform note runs through it all. There is little apparent indication that times have changed and new issues and opportunities are presented to our American government. We see the field of transportation and distribution cut into small sections by local regulations and local competition. One state is pitted against another to secure labor for the development of the individual state—with no thought of national needs.
Surely we cannot, in all fairness, expect the immigrant to distribute himself wisely, to protect himself adequately, to educate himself intelligently, to become a willing citizen without the full coöperation of the native American. Yet upon this whole matter we have no national sense of responsibility, no national consciousness. If a practical bill providing for a national Americanization policy, to be administered by national authoritybut leaving to states and counties and cities their due rights and obligations, were at this moment before Congress, it would have small chance of being considered. The trouble is that we have no convinced body of native Americans behind it to support it.
We have not had a vision of many peoples making one nation, but rather of a few people being worked for by others. Even kindhearted employers with “welfare departments” for their men have little realization of their immigrant workmen as future American people. In many cases the welfare provisions and company housing specificallydo not applyto the immigrant force. The average American housewife does not think of the immigrant and her future in America when she needs a servant, but wonders what nationality will suit her best. I should like to ask how many of our housewives, even our suffragist housewives, know the attitude of their foreign-born servants towards America or how well they are fitted for citizenship? Are they regarded as a civic factor of any importance? The average American officerregards the immigrant as a trouble-maker; but how many cities compile their laws intelligently in a language the immigrant can read, so that he may not become one? It is the native-born American who must separate the wheat from the chaff before we can estimate the wheat and dispose of the chaff.
We cannot treat the immigrant as if he were something to be absorbed, automatically, by inevitable chemical reaction, in the course of time. He is a living, changing, creative organism,needing attention at every minute, and with something to contribute at every point. From the moment he arrives in America he needs thecreative, aggressive attention of American institutions if he is to become a good American. What he gets, when he gets anything, is a chance to touch here and there American institutions adapted to a native-born population andbarely fulfilling the needs of the native born. Take the case of the immigrant who arrives at Ellis Island and goes, let us say, to a New England mill town. Originally it was a conservative little colonial town of 1000 population with no large industries,and with schools, churches, and a library adapted to the population. The introduction of several factories increases the population fourfold, and 75 per cent of the newcomers are foreign born, needing especially to profit by the organized institutions of America. But what really happens is that the institutions adapted to the original 1000 native Americans remain exactly the same—schools, churches, library, court, and houses, for the host of new Americans to fit into them as best they can. In other words, although immigrants may make up from one half to two thirds of that town they do not figure 10 per cent in its activities or 10 per cent in its government or its facilities.
The native-born American has set up some very important and flourishing institutions to perpetuate the ideals of Americanism and to preserve the things dear to him. These have come also to be regarded as the institutions for Americanizing the immigrant. If they Americanize our native-born youth, why not our foreign-born peoples? The native American has adapted them to hisown needs and assumes that they will do for every one. Will they, without any further attention on his part?
The public school comes first. It is the first aid to the nation. It also represents a fundamental principle and obligation in American civilization. Of the 13,000,000 men and women born in other lands, 3,000,000 of them were unable to speak English, according to the 1910 census, and only 38,000 were enrolled in our public schools to learn it. Many important communities, in such important industrial states as Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut, where the population is at least one half immigrant, do not maintainanyclasses whatever where English can be learned.
Even where night schools exist, they are likely to be conducted in an experimental or detached way—as a benevolent “extension” of the public educational system rather than as a legitimate, highly important, and necessary part of public policy. In a city in which 75 per cent of the population is either foreign born or of foreign parentage, the president of the board of education said thisyear: “More night schools for foreigners—well, I don’t know. I am highly interested in the technical night high schools.Ifthere is any money left after these are fully organized, I will see that it goes into classes for English to foreigners.”
But there neverisanything left. On that basis we shall get nowhere. If the alien is to be taught English in this country only after every form of education life is “fully organized”—he will by that time have reached the point where he either cannot or will not be taught. When will America learn that teaching immigrants English and requiring them to learn it is a fundamental necessity, a condition of national vitality?
The Bureau of Naturalization is publishing a statement that during the past year 600 cities have conducted, initiated, or largely extended night-school instruction for aliens. With the usual optimism we point with pride to what America is doing with the native-American taxpayer’s money. Do we not want to know how effective it is? In how many of these 600 cities has this night-schoolwork been put on a basis adequate to the numbers of the foreign-born population? In how many of the 600 has a really adequate system of instruction been worked out—adapted to the needs, trades, shifts, hours of the men, providing for proper classification, textbooks, teachers with vigor and understanding? How long have the terms been and did the immigrants attend?
We should naturally expect New England to lead in this phase of an Americanization policy. According to the data gathered by the Bureau of Education in 1915, Maine had 15 towns with over 1000 foreign born in the population, with no evening schools. Massachusetts had 28, New Hampshire and Vermont each 6, and Rhode Island 4. In Connecticut there are 15 towns with a foreign-born population of over 1000 that have no evening school or other municipal provision for learning citizenship and English. There is no town in the state that has adequate or anything like adequate provisions for this. Yet New Haven has approximately 50,000 foreign born, Bridgeport 40,000, Hartford 35,000,Meriden 10,000, Waterbury 25,000, Stamford 12,000. Concerning Connecticut the lament of nativism that the “State is rapidly being foreignized” is coming loud and strong. And it is true. How, with the situation described above, could it be otherwise?
For the immigrant in the courts our cherished “equality before the law” is not realized. There have been a great many studies and investigations into the “immigrant’s influence on crime” and his responsibility for this or that percentage of it. But there has never been a constructive effort to make the machinery of the law adaptable to the immigrant. With thoroughgoing nativism, the native-born Americans have set up the kinds of courts they need for themselves, and have installed forms of procedure that they know and understand. They proceed on the assumption that every man knows the law, and that every man can tell his tale in English. These assumptions were justified, back in the days when our courts were founded. A man used to the town-meeting scheme of government knew of what government consistedand what it entailed. In answer to requests for interpreters, for the distribution of information concerning laws, for modifications of judgments where ignorance was the cause of the violation, we are constantly met with the unsympathetic statement that if the system is good enough for Americans and for America, it is good enough for the Italians and the Germans and the Irish and the Jews and the Russians. We so seldom think of laws and courts as educational, as incentives to right doing, but always as punitive, even though this may be the immigrant’s first contact with this leading American institution.
An immigrant lands in America and gets whatever work he can. He does not know, and no governmental agency takes the trouble to tell him, what particular restrictions there are on any given occupation. No one explains to him for which job he has to have a license or which occupations are open only to citizens. He does not know our ordinances about the disposal of garbage or ashes. He may come from a region where there are no free schools, and he does not know thatthe law in this country obliges him to send his children to school. Unwittingly, with the best intentions in the world, he may offend in almost every relation of his life. Suppose that he does offend and is brought into court. If he cannot speak English, he is supposed to rely on the court interpreter. In many places there is no court interpreter. In Chicago, a short time ago, an investigation of courts disclosed the fact that the judge sometimes had to order volunteer interpreters to leave the room because they were interpreting wrongly time after time. The judges stated that there were a few men of that kind who made a practice of hanging around the courts and interpreting wrongly whenever it was to their advantage to do so.
Unable to make himself understood, and without competent and honest assistance from an interpreter, the alien is placed at an additional disadvantage in our courts. Ignorant of his rights, not understanding what his offense is, he is tried and convicted, and leaves the court wondering what he has done that justifies it in branding him as a law breaker. Hisrespect for American law and for American justice does not outlive many experiences of this kind, and another door to Americanism is closed.
Our journals are also nativistic. We are known as a country ruled and governed by our newspapers, which are said to be able to make and unmake political parties, and to raise a politician or statesman to a dizzy pinnacle of fame or else to cast him headlong into oblivion. The average paper has page after page—on Saturdays and Sundays, section after section—full of articles that are suggestive and instructive to those who have their bearings already, but a helpless, hopeless maze to those who have come to America so recently that they still need an occasional signpost to guide them through our political mazes. It seems to be assumed that the readers know the form, the history, the value, and the significance of American institutions, and need only to have them attended to or referred to, the more casually the better. Some of our most significant journals take apparent pride in being cryptic. They ignore the presence inthis country of millions who need to be informed, who ardently desire information, about our history and our institutions, and who do not know where they can obtain it from an English-speaking source.
About 9,000,000 people in this country read foreign-language newspapers. Some of them are persons who read these papers largely from necessity while they are learning English, and some of them never intend to learn, and never do learn, English at all. An immigrant who arrives in this country without being able to speak English finds that it takes a considerable time to learn it—the length of time depending on the place he finds work in and the people he works with. Now in this period, long or short, which must elapse before the alien learns English, the foreign-language newspaper could be an invaluable Americanizing agent. But it cannot be so without the coöperation of the native press and native Americans. And that we have never given. Our big manufacturers advertise in thousands of these papers to sell goods. Otherwise we donot concern ourselves with them at all, except to regardallwith suspicion when we learn of the disloyalty ofone. Many of the editors of these papers, themselves not Americanized in any complete sense, are making inadequate but persistent efforts to connect their people with American institutions to lead them to become Americans, real citizens of this republic. They get little help from us. The American press is increasingly proud of its position as one of the very greatest of our social institutions. It is run for labor, for capital, for society, for business, for the man in the street; but it is run very little for the foreign-born citizen or alien who against odds is trying to accomplish his own assimilation. Yet this is exactly the task in which the newspaper that considered his interests and his needs could help him most.
The public library, especially in cities where public school branches are maintained, has a great opportunity to reach the adult immigrant in his own neighborhood, in community reading rooms, by providing newspapers, books in the native language, simple books about America,either in English or translated into the native tongue. Whenever public library facilities are extended to immigrants, there is ample testimony to the enthusiasm with which they are received. A few years ago the management of the New York City public library in a very interesting report gave some startling figures covering the patronage of the public libraries by the foreign born of New York City, showing that they were exceptionally eager and persistent readers, and of the more serious forms of literature—history, philosophy, science, and drama. In hundreds of industrial towns of the country the public library is a virtual mausoleum, a monument to culture, little used but “always there.” Whole sections of the town that have never found the way to the library, and who might not be made welcome if they did, are starving for some recreative interest, some sources of information which they could manage.
But here occurs a stumblingblock. The native American has a prejudice against furnishing books in a foreign language and often proceeds on the theorythat although he does nothing to furnish facilities for learning English, it is better that the immigrant should read nothing while he waits.
It is idle to fear that the foreign-language book is an obstacle to Americanization. Anything that increases the alien’s intelligence, and especially his information about America, is an aid, not a hindrance. Outside of the large cities few libraries have any collection of foreign books. Those that do are likely to have an entirely academic or classical assortment. A few weeks ago, in investigating the public library facilities of one of our big steel towns, now given over to the production of munitions, it was discovered that the foreign language “collection” adapted to the races in the town consisted of one Polish book. In one industrial town which is heavily immigrant a public library a few weeks ago opened a branch in a foreign bank—and, as might be expected, it is flourishing.
One of the chief American grievances against the immigrant is that he does not spend or invest his money here. Until the establishment of the postalsavings banks he had little encouragement to do so. Here again we cling stubbornly to our nativism, and maintain that arrangements that are satisfactory to the native born are good enough for the foreign born as well. Few banks have foreign departments, although of late the number is increasing. The ordinary bank is not adapted to the immigrant. He is intimidated by it and is not always welcome. That 59 per cent of the present investors in the Postal Savings Banks are foreign born, and that this 59 per cent owns 72 per cent of all the money now on deposit is significant proof that the immigrantwilluse our banks as an institution.
If I have given the impression that the entire responsibility for Americanism is the native American’s, I have failed in my purpose. I have but attempted to restore the balance and point out the really controlling factor in Americanism.
If I have failed to note the many very important and excellent movements now under way in the name of reform and paid by benevolence, it is not that I underestimate their value. It is because Iwant the native American to realize that reform and philanthropy are no more now to be the custodians of Americanism than when the Declaration of Independence was signed. It is the average business man in his plant and the average official in his government office that must preserve it in every thought, act, and ambition of the day’s routine work—carrying always the overhead charge of patriotism and nationalism.
This fixing of initial responsibility does not mean that the immigrant has no responsibility. Far from it. He must be ready to stay in America, to become a citizen, to adopt American standards, to obey our laws, to meet his obligations, to do his duty, to assume his responsibilities for, as well as to exercise, his rights. But he must know what these are. He must realize that the native American knows what they are and will set him a good example. He must be told that he is expected to meet the requirements or America does not want him and will not keep him. Our admission and exclusion laws serve no such notice on him. The literacy test is a plain evasionof the native American’s responsibility and a lazy way of thinking out the problem. We native Americans in business or in office have never addressed ourselves seriously to the task of making Americans or nationalizing America. When we do, we shall have as strong a nation as we have bridges and railways and banks.
It is possible that we have been admitting too many people of too wide a variety for the native American to Americanize. It is certainly true that we should hesitate to admit many others until we have demonstrated our ability to provide an assimilation policy for the nation. We cannot forever depend upon the missionary for the Americanization of aliens. Shall we close the doors as the only way to preserve Americanism? Will this be a confession of our utter failure to deal in a statesmanlike way with either the international or national situation which confronts us?
It seems to me that our real enemy is not an aggressive foreignism, but a passive, complacent Americanism or nativism. What we really need to fearis, not that we shall be invaded by civilizations and ideals we cannot assimilate, but that we shall fail to develop and perpetuate and extend to all Americans the civilization and the ideals we firmly believe to be American.
I consider that a most dangerous fallacy in this country to-day is the belief that the evils that have overtaken us through the immigrant are the result of an undue expansion of our hospitality, an undue breadth of interpretation of America as the land of liberty, open to all. What we are really suffering from is not undue expansion but undue contraction, a determined withdrawal of native Americans from the real situation in America, a positive refusal to face their destiny, a stupid neglect to provide anything for the immigrant but a job.
It seems to me the height of complacent nativism to ascribe our social and political evils to unrestricted immigration, when as a matter of fact we have never developed facilities for assimilating them or given the matter much constructive attention of any kind. We have no informationconcerning the numbers and kinds of immigrants which our country and our institutions can assimilate, and until we have these we are not in a position for judgment.
I believe emphatically that unless America can show itself worthy of its traditions and opportunities, we should not be honored nor sought as “an asylum for the oppressed,” nor be regarded as “a refuge from tyranny,” and that we should close our doors and put up a sign that means what we say. I am equally positive that we should give a constructive policy a fair trial—starting at Ellis Island and following the alien to the last hamlet with information, advice, and protection, with assurance of equality before the law in all respects, and giving him the full guarantees of our Constitution. If under these conditions he prefers his home language to ours, pays his allegiance to a country other than America, sends his savings home to be invested, persists in a second-rate standard of living, asserts his rights but refuses to meet his duties, reads the foreign language press instead of theAmerican, joins the racial society instead of the city club,—then we shall know the fault is not the native American’s, and we can put up the bars with a clear conscience and with courage in our hearts.
Americanism faces the future and is courageous. Nativism faces the past and is apprehensive. Never in the history of nations shall we have a greater opportunity to attain stability and leadership than now. The native American has in his own hands the power to build a great future for his land. He has the needed qualities, too; he has an idealism such as the world never witnessed before, in so high a degree as to seem naïve or childish to citizens of older races dyed in intrigue and used to always looking for the hidden motive under every apparently open move. He has courage and a faith in liberty detached though it sometimes is from his daily life. And I am one of those who hold that he still believes in equality—in spite of the manifold contradictions we see all about us.
But he is, as we have seen, blind beyond parallel to his opportunities—to a degreethat makes us question sometimes whether he has not, after all, committed the unpardonable sin of sinning against the light. He has been stupid, foolish, trivial. He has been content to treat his belief in liberty and equality as many a man treats his religion—as something precious, but not to be used in daily life.
It is not too late for the American to face about from his nativism, from his contentment with considering only the needs and interests of the native born, and to consider the needs of America as a whole, America as he sees it and meets it every day, in his shop or mill,—the America of the native bornand the foreign born as well. Let him but recognize once for all that the foreigner’s needs are the same as his needs, that everyone wants a decent home and a place to sit in, and book or paper to read, a safe place to keep his savings, a chance for himself and his family to keep well,—all the varied needs of the body and the soul,—let him but recognize that the alien and the native-born both need and desire these things, and then make it his responsibility to provide them and the battle will be won.
Weare the great adventure of the twentieth century. And the foes we have to fear are not the hosts that come to us to profit by our liberty and opportunity, but the lack of wisdom and of courage that makes us unfit to administer our heritage and to meet our destiny. Nativism is no substitute for Americanism.