CHAPTER XX
Our Country's Part Among the Nations
Precedingchapters have indicated our present national unfitness in so many things concerning our domestic public life. Yet, until recently, we were enabled to concentrate what public mind and spirit we had upon such problems as arose among ourselves from the conditions of our internal growth. Now, being weak, hesitant, and our wills quite unformed, we are suddenly hurled into the very center of the international whirlpool. In the preparation for and in the execution of our part in the Great War, we were, no doubt, quite magnificent. But no one ever doubted our ability to fight. It is in the execution of the greater tasks of peace that we falter and fail.
With the close of the war there was presented to us, in the urge to world leadership, the most difficult and dangerous problem of all. Here, again, we were offered no alternative. We must go. We must help to "settle order once again." We drew back from Paris, only to reassemble the nations at Washington.
Two opposite opinions have settled in the minds of the majority of Americans with reference to the subject matter of this chapter. One would have us move far out and lose ourselves in a mad mixing world. The other would withdraw us from the world utterly and hide us like a "hermit crab" in any rotting shell we find. I shall here show that one of these policies is impossible to execute. I shall prove, also, that the other, if fully carried out, would destroy us as a people. Between the two, surely, there lies a way in which our ship may move more safely towards its appointed haven.
Changed international relationships are largely the result of new forces, physical forces, in the economic and social life of theworld. These forces were drawing and pushing all the nations of the world very close together. The first wireless message has only recently been sent entirely around the world. Commercial aviation, already widely in vogue upon land, will presently span the Atlantic and then the Pacific. The commercial and financial dependence of each modernized country upon the other is too commonly realized to need much emphasis here. If Europe does not buy cotton, the Oklahoma farmer can not pay his taxes or his grocery bill. If the Germans can not borrow money in New York and London, they can not buy raw material to work upon; hence, France, Belgium and Italy, getting no reparations, will not be able to pay their American creditors. So runs the system into every counting house, factory and cow stable of the civilized world. Railway lines now penetrate the deserts of Asia and the jungles of Africa. Everywhere the half-naked savage is trained to work at strangely modern tasks. So ishis labor interwoven by the machine process into our gigantic fabric of international industrialism. All the world unites because it is impossible to any longer stay divided. He who does not understand these things of the world's work can not begin to think intelligently concerning international relationship.
Our large American part in the life of the world is, and is to be, determined by a number of factors. These include our wealth, our comparative numbers, our national state of mind, and the place we hold in the opinions of other peoples. We are seven per cent of the world's population and sixteen per cent of the world's white population. At the table of the great International Disarmament Conference at Washington we sat with Britain, France, Italy, and Japan. Our wealth is probably greater than that of all these combined, including the white colonies of the British Empire. In power to make war we undoubtedly stand alone. These elements of physical greatness indicate our natural part in the reorganization of the shattered world. We can not leave the world to its ways and build a Chinese wall around America; nor would we if we could. No wonder our old-fashioned American citizen was deeply worried in the year of 1920. "Whither," he asked, and "how far are we going?" So he decided to pause and wait awhile. Deep within the national mind was the terrible knowledge that, with our feet entering strange and devious ways, our lamp was untrimmed.
We cannot accept an internationalism that would compromise the immigration issue either in the East or West. We can not serve Japan by permitting her to annex California as she has already annexed Hawaii. We can not save the world by seeking first our own dissolution. An international market for money and goods is one thing. A free international market for wage-laborers is quite another. If we are to undertake our international task, wemust ever more jealously guard the strength which is ours by inheritance. Let us cleave even more firmly to those things of mind and character that have created us a nation. As a unified and democratic people, as a successful, happy and educated people, we can no doubt play a leading part in organizing the world for better things. All the world cries out for this leadership of America. But we are as yet unfit to lead. The nations, which are sinking, stretch out their hands to lay hold of ours, but we ourselves are falling into the pit. One who reaches down his hand to rescue a man falling into Niagara's current must first be sure of his own footing. If we are to save others we must begin by first saving ourselves. It is impossible to resist the influences that make for internationalism. But it is possible, it is absolutely necessary, to save and make perfect our nationalism upon which any useful internationalism must be based. To speak of internationalism as taking the place of nationalism is to deny the very meaning of the word from thestart. The separate nation, in its world relationships, may be compared to a separate home in a community. The citizen joins with his neighbors to construct a road, to build a village school, to maintain a police and fire service. But the community effort is not undertaken for the purpose of dissolving and destroying the home. Just the contrary. The community protects and serves the home. It accomplishes what the single can not undertake.
Eventually there will come, if we learn to lead, a great world community. It will come slowly, growing through the centuries. Our own country, ever more positive of her individuality, of the deeper things of her own personality, of the true worth of her inmost soul, and with a realizing sense of the value she can so contribute, may yet aspire to the privilege and the honor of that world leadership which will make for the peace, unity and well-being of all.
CHAPTER XXI
We English-Speaking People Must Stand Together
Here, too, a choice is not permitted us. The desperate condition of the world is forcing our minds and hearts. The demand is given to us who speak English: "CO-OPERATE, OR PERISH WITH A PERISHING WORLD."
This broken world can not be put upon the path of peace and prosperity without the most careful and courageous leadership. Modern industrial and commercial conditions, in a word, the machine process, has thrown all the nations of the world together. If we can not separate ourselves from the other nations, if all the world must eventually march in the same direction, the only practical question relates to the direction of the march. Are we to be saved together, or are we going to fall together into the pit of a new sequence of the Dark Ages?The great masses of the colored races, mostly unfitted for self rule, must be protected, civilized, educated, and led onward and upward toward the best that they can do. On the other hand lies the dread alternative of a military imperium which might eventually organize the whole of China and India. If we do not organize the world for peace, it is not impossible to conceive that twenty-five years of astute propaganda might win all these seven hundred and fifty millions to the militaristic leadership of Japan. A great Indian nationalist leader recently said that no one fact had so aroused and encouraged the spirit of India as the present brilliant role of the Japanese nation. Such a pan-Asiatic movement might very likely draw Russia, Germany and several other European nations into a new and terrible alliance. The poor and the dejected always seem to find cause enough to pick a quarrel with the rich and the powerful. I repeat, if the English-speaking people will not undertake together the task of giving ordered progress and freedom tothe world, upon what nation or nations is the duty to devolve? We have rejected, rightly or wrongly, the League of Nations. What next?
In this connection the happy solution of the age-worn Irish question makes straight the way. While the Irish in the home-land were in rebellion against Britain, the political waters of every English-speaking country in the world were made muddy. Peace in Ireland makes our task of co-partnership with the British Empire easier and simpler. Indeed, directly after the signatures were attached to the British treaty of peace with Ireland, a distinguished Irish leader remarked that he hoped to see America cooperate with all the other English-speaking people who are united through the British Empire.
Let us glance briefly at some essential conclusions to which the reduction of naval armaments inevitably leads. The American and the British navies are to be madeabout equal. In ten years time an almost perfect equality will be secured. These two navies, taken together, will of course dominate the seven oceans. The only naval power which will remotely compare to either is that of Japan. Because of our wealth and population, also because of our industries, production and commerce, the United States and the British will have no immediate rivals. Together, we can declare the world's peace. Together, we can give the world a decent measure of order. We include, of course, the practically independent and rapidly growing nations of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. It will be readily seen how much greater is our power, a united power, for good than any other possible combination of nations in the world. Here, tossed about in a sea of color, lies the white man's hope. Here, too, is large hope for all the world. Under the world peace we can establish the forces that make for international justice which will at last be given a chance to function; while under the threat of war every sortof inhuman and barbaric force will win its way. Given an assured peace and better minds and gentler hearts among our English-speaking people will never be silenced. They will triumph in our own countries first. They will save the world as a matter of course. On the other hand, world anarchy and world war will always submerge every liberal voice and every progressive policy among all nations, ourselves included.
We need no formal alliance with the British to bring these things to pass. The alliance of the American with the British people is formed by all the qualities we have in common. These are already more powerful than any document. The theory that competition for the world's trade makes co-partnership in everything and anything impossible for us is a piece of ignorant nonsense. All our better humanity is crying out the command that trade keep to its rightful place in human affairs. If this Anglo-American understanding could have been possible tenyears ago there would have been no World War. At that time we in America were not ready for co-operation. If we are not entirely ready for it to-day, then under the Providence of Almighty God, and being responsible to Him alone, those of us who see the light must make all ready for it.
With every forward step we try to take toward the peace and the salvation of the world, we shall find, at first, blocking our way and attempting to push us back, our great foreign cities. The war, in so far as we Americans ourselves are concerned, has not liberated us from this tyranny of the foreign vote. It is, in large part, still mobilized on the wrong side of almost every public question we can think of. However, we may now expect this influence to slowly give way to better knowledge and wiser counsels. With the Irish question finally settled, our Irish fellow-citizens here will have no further occasion to oppose the British at every step. Our German voters, too, may soon come tolearn that Germany cannot be saved if the world be lost. If we American-born citizens can only attain sufficient unity to once for all ignore the foreign vote, and rule ourselves intelligently, we shall soon discover that vote has ceased to be a danger. But it will not cease to curse America for fifty years if it is not met with the firmness of a united American will. Let us draw a line about the foreign sections and about the hyphenated votes, and declare our absolute independence of them. During the war this foreign vote was silenced and nullified. So it will be again as soon as we speak our national mind with certainty of purpose.
Illustration: God is our Refuge and Strength
In perfect harmony with the British people, we are now seeking and securing naval disarmament. Having limited and equalized our power for defense, it is absolutely essential that we stand together to prevent the building, among possible enemies, of dangerous armaments on sea or land. No doubt Japan will, from this timeon, carefully heed the united demand of our two English-speaking peoples. The first imperative duty that we must accomplish together concerns the protection of China from the lusts of the exploiter. The independence of the Chinese nation must be guaranteed. Her unity must be re-established. Her resources must be protected from the greedy ones among our own citizens who would take from the Chinese people the resources they so much need for their future. To-day China can not protect herself. It is incumbent upon us to afford her the fullest measure of protection. The gratitude and esteem our children will receive from the Chinese nation will be in the future the strongest and surest of all the guarantees of world peace.
We in America are as much interested in the care and progress of the African peoples as are the British. Why should we not share in this responsibility? What a boon to the future of those backwardblack people of Africa, should they find themselves more largely united through the more general teaching of the English language! More and more will such of our American Negroes as are unhappy here, find a place of refuge in their native land of Africa. We should be serving the highest purposes in a number of ways were we to purchase the Congo Free State from Belgium and the Portuguese colonies in the Southern part of the continent. Side by side with the British Empire we could help in administering the affairs of those barbaric peoples in their own interest. The third international plague spot is the Near East. With the heavy tyranny of the Sultan removed, the conglomeration of broken and unhappy peoples who composed his subject population have been freed. To-day they fight and fester like vermin stifled and starving in a dark place. It seemed to many Americans that, after the war, supervision of these Christian peoples was our particular duty.
Why should we, speaking the language of the mighty dead, who gave command in the English tongue, be so fearful of sharing each other's purposes and each other's tasks? We are what we are; and it so happens that we are forced by circumstances to guide the world. Let us lead wisely and well, winning for our children gratitude and esteem. Let us have done with all this sickening pose of Pecksniff and Uriah Heap, and do the great deeds to which our times call us as Cromwell and Washington would have done!
We need world vision to-day. "Without vision the people perish." But we need more than vision. We require great, practical, general policies of world reorganization; and the veritable cornerstone of that policy is this mighty English-speaking co-partnership. This saving fellowship we Klansmen propose to advance by every means in our power. The common language through which the whole world must ultimately find communion is theEnglish language. This is evident to anybody who even casually surveys the linguistic map of the world. North America, India, Australia, more than half of Africa—such is the future empire of Shakespeare and Milton and Lowell and Poe. Beside all the various national languages and local dialects, our language will be used as a means of universal conversation. So shall our every word, for good or for ill, be a word spoken in authority to the whole world.
CHAPTER XXII
The Nemesis of Immigration
OurAmerican civilization has received during these three hundred years two crushing blows. So staggering have been these onslaughts that it is still doubtful whether or not we can recover and go on as a democratic people. On both occasions the blows have come primarily from a relatively small group of profiteers. During the first two hundred years of our history the African slave traders of old England and New England traded their vile cargoes of rum for the black man, and sold him throughout the Americas. So they accursed half our country with slavery. To-day their deeds remain in the form of a large population of black people, which, like a millstone about its neck, still drags upon every natural aspiration of the Southland.
The desire for cheap labor was not fully satiated through the importation of theAfrican slave. The coming of modern industrialism gave it a new turn. Our American system of industrialism has been based, from the first, largely upon a European system of labor. Without the slightest question as to their unfitness to take part in our social life, or our political democracy, without thought of anything in the world but securing much labor for little money, our employing classes have, until very recently, persuaded the nation to give them a free hand in their immigration policy. What the importation of the black man did to the South in accursing our history for centuries, immigration has done and is still doing to the industrial districts of the North and West. Having advanced far beyond Europe in the development of a democratic civilization, we have now again, deliberately, turned back upon our past and prevented the social, intellectual and political progress of our country by instituting the conditions of a degrading poverty, illiteracy, overcrowding, slums, and mediaeval religious worship. The gang rule and theboss rule of our cities are simply a return to monarchical forms without the decencies of government and the refinements of society which an hereditary monarch provides. All this we have gotten together with the riches we so much craved. We have amassed our wealth only to realize, perhaps too late, that our very food and drink are ashes and vinegar.
There have come into America during the last fifty years great hordes of immigrants. The tide reached its height in the fiscal year ending June 30, 1914, when it totalled 1,320,000. From Europe there came during the fiscal year ending June 30, 1921, 805,000. With our cities swarming with millions of unemployed, congress was impelled at the end of the last fiscal year to pass the three per cent law. This law permits, annually, immigrants to come from each European nation to the extent of three per cent of their peoples already here in 1910. That is, if 100,000 Rumanians were settled among us in 1910, 3,000 a yearare now permitted to come. This law is difficult to enforce. Within an hour I have read in the day's news that 1,100 immigrants, mostly from Hungary and Armenia, brought over by the greedy shipping companies in excess of the three per cent quota of those nations, are to be admitted. This is done as a Christmas gift to these unfortunate people. Once arrived at our ports, who can have the heart to return these unfortunates to Europe. No doubt this act of charity will be repeated again and again.
If we permit this three per cent law to be continued during a time of economic stress and unemployment, we may expect the profiteers, and cheap labor advocates generally, to come upon us with their demand of unrestricted immigration as soon as times are better and workers are more in demand. Of course, as might be expected, these foreign born already here are most zealous in their advocacy of unrestricted immigration. In the first place they wish to bring over their relatives and friends. Then, too,the foreign born wrongly interprets all opposition to unlimited immigration as being a base imputation against his particular people. The thoughtless and unpatriotic appeal of all these groups is usually made upon the basis of a sentimentalism. "Is America not the haven of refuge for the oppressed?" they ask. In the same manner was the trade in African Negroes defended three hundred years ago. The blacks were being brought over, it was said, "in order to Christianize them." If half of them died on the way and were thrown overboard to feed the sharks, as often happened, still our intentions were said to be Christian. This sickly, and ofttimes affected, sentimentalism is one of the most disgusting features of both the criminal profiteering of the few, and of the criminal carelessness of the many among our people.
Reflect for a moment upon the fact that there are at least one hundred millions of poor in Europe, who would come to America now if they could. They await only shipspace and money to pay for their passage. To bring over one million this year is always to prepare the way for two millions next year. Each incoming crowd soon invites and pays the way for a greater host of relatives and friends.
This importation of the poor and destitute does not much benefit European countries, if indeed it helps them at all. A country, which, like Italy or Belgium, is primarily industrial in character, has long since reached its limit of population. Remove a million Belgians or a million Italians to America, and their places are at once refilled by a million more births at home. Hence the creation of Italian or Belgian slums in Boston, Pittsburgh and Chicago does not ultimately decrease the size of the slums in Brussels or Naples. Nor does the overflowing tide help the home country where, as from Poland or Hungary, the emigrants are largely peasants. The land of Poland and Hungary is held in large estates. Every peasant who deserts thesoil of Europe to fester in our cities merely postpones the change in the land system which denies him opportunity in his own country. Furthermore, in Poland, Hungary, Rumania, etc., this peasant is now needed more than ever before to raise food crops. He leaves his country because conditions are bad. These evil conditions are due, in part, to the aftermath of war. But this is only secondary. The primary cause of poverty among the peasants of Southern and Eastern Europe has been large holdings of land and conditions of practical serfdom, but, above all, primitive and backward means of production. Instead of plowing his land with a plow, this backward peasant turns it up with a hoe three times the weight and with only half the cutting edge of an American garden hoe. Instead of reaping his grain with a reaper, the Polish or Russian peasant reaps with a scythe of about the size, weight and shape of an American fence rail. So, to compensate for his own ignorance, backwardness, and the crude mediaevalism of his whole environment,this peasant escapes responsibility by rushing to the United States. His case is exactly the same as that of the city wastrel from Belgium or Italy. In leaving his own country he does not help it in the least. In coming to America he drags us down to the pit of Hell.
As regards the immigration from Japan, the West Indies, and Mexico, the conditions are only exaggerated. They are exaggerated by greater differences in race and by the wider gulf which separates our economic conditions from theirs. There are tens of millions of people in India who never know from one year's end to another what it means to have enough to eat. One good American dollar will outfit their wardrobe for twelve months. Throw these millions into the industrial life of America, and in twenty years' time their place in India will be taken by as many millions more, just as wretched, just as absolutely hopeless as the millions who are begging, starving and dying to-day. Here is a place where sentimentalisms are only trash. A sentimental attitude by an American toward this problem is a criminal attitude. It is a sort of criminal insanity which makes for suicide. If the suicidal intent concerned only the individual, we should not worry nearly so much. But it is our country which is committing suicide.
The problem may be simplified by a comparison. Let us picture our sentimentalist as possessed of an American family of wife and three children living in an eight room house. Will this average citizen welcome the arriving immigrants into his own house to the extent of five per room? If he lives in Texas, will he fill his home with Mexican peons; if in California, with Japanese and Hindoos; if in New York, with Sicilians or Turks? All that I ask is that he be fully consistent. If the sentimentalist is willing to prevent his own children from having homes in America in order to provide homes for the Japanese; if he is willing to prevent his American neighbors from having children in order to make way for the children of the Japanese of to-morrow—then he ought to be willing to open wide the door of his own house in order to provide for the destitute immigrant.
There is something quite terrible in the stern fact that this country will belong to the people who multiply most rapidly. The imbeciles and the other feeble-minded, if permitted to do so, multiply much more rapidly than normal persons. Suppose that we permit this class to multiply at will and carefully preserve its progeny from disease and other causes of a high mortality. In that case we can easily calculate the time when the feeble-minded and insane will number a majority of our population. Among the competing races in America the birth-rate is the ultimate victor. The German and the Irish among us outbreed the original Americans. The French-Canadians and the Poles outbreed the Germans and the Irish. The Negroes and the Japanese outbreed all the whites. Return tothe liberal immigration policy of five years ago and we shall become a conglomeration out of which it will be impossible to build a nation. Under such conditions almost no sound reform policies, no national progressive movement of any sort, can be successfully advocated and executed. Stop immigration and a homogeneous English-speaking nation will again be developed. Such a nation will solve every economic and social problem as it arrives. Such a nation will develop according to our Anglo-Saxon methods of free speech, free press, democratic methods and popular respect for the law. We are dealing here with the most crucial and fundamental issue of our generation.
The time has come to brand every advocate of continued immigration as the outright enemy of this country and of our American civilization. We are already two generations late in waking up to this matter. We are on the very brink of the pit, and if we are to act at all, we must act in unity and at once. Eventually, after our presentforeign element has been Americanized and absorbed as best it may be we might permit again a small amount of carefully selected immigration annually. But even that would be a mistake. Future Americans should be born and reared in America. Again and again let me urge that I am not claiming that Americans are inherently superior to other peoples. We have a peculiar civilization to guard and to guide. The tendency in our industrial regime is always for the weaker, the more humble, the more serf-like peoples to undermine the sturdier native whose standard of living spells his destruction. The lower standard of living which the immigrant willingly accepts, at least at first, is his essential curse. Admitting swarms of low standard Europeans in order to "bring American working people to reason" as regards their wages and conditions is a piece of ignorant folly. In the end this always increases, instead of decreases, our labor difficulties.
A "Klonklave" where One Thousand "Aliens" were "Naturalized" and Became Citizens of The Invisible Empire.
As I have already stated, our American labor problem can not be solved by breaking down the American standard of living and the American spirit among American born working men. Our labor problem can be solved only by winning the employers and workers alike to accept a common policy of justice and Americanism. The view that there is ever "more work in America than we can do ourselves" is the falsest of false economic theories. Why should we try to exploit our resources or develop new projects of any sort at the crazy and destructive rate of speed which has marked our industrialism during the past generation? Just the contrary is the correct policy. The unskilled labor of America must be done by Americans. A dozen of our presidents have wielded the axe and guided the plow. The very foundation of our country is a sturdy, intelligent, characterful and self-respecting working class, who do not at all crave to be parsons and college professors. Better build fewer miles of highway or dig less coal than destroy our civilization by the admixture of unsuitable and unworthy elements. There is an old story of a farmer who burned downhis barn in order to get rid of the rats. Here we have a case of burning down one's house in order to settle an argument as to who is going to wash the dishes. Right here appears what may be our supreme test in the building of a great nation, in the conservation of our democratic civilization. Are we Americans ready and willing to eat our bread by the sweat of our brow? If we are, we shall live and prosper as a people. If we are not, if we crave the importation of an ever larger servile class, then we shall perish, and we shall deserve to perish. Democracy is impossible in the presence of a class which holds common labor in disesteem. On the other hand, no idle aristocratic class exists in all the world, that the mills of the gods will not grind to dust and oblivion in the end.
Another aspect of European emigration deserves especial comment. Let us take for granted that it is desirable for a certain number of Europeans to emigrate from their various home lands. Why do they not goto South America, where millions of square miles are as yet untilled and unbroken, and where raw materials in countless amounts await the tools and the initiative of the worker? Or, why does not the European emigrant go to East Africa, where a fair and fruitful land, resembling California, is open to settlement by white men? Australia, with three millions of square miles, has a population of only six millions. She can take millions of immigrants, and provide lands and plenty.
The answer is simplicity itself, the mass of European wage workers and peasants to-day do not wish to become pioneers. Those who are physically, mentally and morally capable of becoming independent and successful farmers no longer emigrate. They stay at home and improve their conditions by instituting modern methods, as in Germany, Ireland, and Scandinavia. They know that we have no longer free lands for them. The present European emigrant is one who wishes to become a citywage-worker or petty trader. Here in America considerable numbers have attained great wealth. It is this story of the poor emigrant boy who acquires millions of money and perhaps political distinction which troubles the mind and disturbs the sleep of the unemployed European wage worker, the peddler and the landless peasant. Stop European emigration to the United States and within ten years South America, Africa and Australia will begin to receive such emigrants as they need for their natural and rightful development. But those who emigrate from Europe to the great open spaces of the world will be forced to become farmers, foresters and miners, producing the solid wealth which all the world needs.
One further word. We shall presently come again upon a period of prosperity. It will be limited by world conditions, probably, to a few months, at the most to a year or two. During this period an enormous propaganda for unlimited immigration will be again financed by the profiteers and supported by the feeble minded and weeping sentimentalists. At that time the intelligent and patriotic portion of our citizenship must be especially alert and active. We must so organize our working forces that great numbers can readily be shifted from city factories to the harvest fields and back again. Certain seasonable trades and outdoor construction work can be made to supplement one another, so that the workers will not be forced out of employment at any season of the year. To a man of the breadth and experience of, for instance, Mr. Ford, the execution of such a plan would be simplicity itself. We Americans can and must solve these peculiar industrial problems on the basis of a slowly increasing native population.
I realize fully that to consummate so great a reform as the permanent stopping of immigration requires the setting in motion of larger forces than the Klan can command. To this end every American must function through his political party, hisfraternal order, his business associates or labor union, and his church. All the argument is on one side. What we require is action, and we Klansmen propose to have it without further dilly-dallying and compromise.
CHAPTER XXIII
The Problem of Restricting the Suffrage
Duringnearly the whole of the nineteenth century our American people played up hill and down dale with a very dangerous political doctrine. I refer to the theory of unrestricted suffrage. Probably a majority of our people actually came to believe that because a man (or a woman) had arrived at the age of twenty-one, that was reason enough for granting him the right to vote. This individual might be illiterate. He might be mentally undeveloped, perhaps an imbecile. If our imaginary voter were deaf, dumb and blind, besides being halt, he could still be carried to the polls and his vote registered and counted.
Only recently have any considerable number of our people come to take a practical view of this thing. At last we arebeginning to see that this, like any other good principle of life, may be driven to excess. One may work too hard or think too much. Even the most exalted virtues may be overdone. So it is with the principles of democracy. Having succeeded with a large measure of democracy, by the time our government was put into operation, we did not lack those who were prepared to see it carried to fanatical and dangerous extremes. So the spoils system has been long defended as being a necessary attribute of democracy. Politicians discovered that votes might be secured through disclaiming all breeding, culture, and even denouncing efficiency in office. Instead of trying to make of our democratic system a sound and reasonable way of conducting public business, our people fell to advocating certain democratic political and social theories with a sort of religious frenzy.
So it was with universal suffrage. A corrupt government at Washington would never have been permitted to enfranchisethe Negroes directly after their emancipation had it not been for the wide acceptance among our people of this false theory of the suffrage. If "everybody should vote," then, indeed, how could the freed Negro be denied this "inherent and inalienable right."
Of course, as a matter of fact, the vote has always been denied to certain groups and classes. To begin with, the young people under twenty-one years of age, in the eyes of the law, "infants," were disfranchised. These had no "inherent and inalienable" right to vote, because of their immaturity. Until recently women were not allowed to vote on the basis that the franchise would interfere with the performance of domestic duties. Paupers and criminals are also disfranchised.
However, it is quite true that heretofore our theory of the suffrage has been that any adult male could vote unless specific cause were shown why he should be disfranchised. Right here we must reverse ourapproach to the subject. The burden of proof should be upon the other side. Our prospective voter should be made to show indisputable reason for enfranchisement, instead of being permitted to vote unless cause for disfranchisement can be shown. In other words, the ballot must be considered a privilege and not an "inherent and inalienable right."
This brings us to the question of the standards to be enforced. No doubt this is a very difficult matter to decide. A very large proportion of our people are quite likely averse to any change. That the wind is blowing in the right direction is indicated, however, by a general tendency to raise the standards of the suffrage. Thus, in the State of New York, in the last election (1921) an amendment to the State Constitution was passed requiring that a prospective citizen and voter should read and write in English. What is needed is an amendment not only to the various state constitutions, but to the nationalconstitution. In preparation for such a drastic and far-reaching step, the national mind should be prepared by the widest possible discussion of the problem.
The suggestion that I am to make here I wish to be understood as purely tentative. I realize fully that the whole discussion is just beginning.
Hardly anybody will deny that reading, writing and speaking the English language with facility should be required of every voter. Without the ready use of English it is impossible for foreigner or native born to keep himself sufficiently acquainted with affairs to vote intelligently. This requirement would disfranchise a considerable portion of our native born whites, and a much larger portion of our Negro and immigrant population. It is not too much to say that the graver danger of the ignorant voter would be abolished by this measure,—that is, if the measure were properly drawn and strictly enforced, and atthe same time would guarantee absolute and complete rights of all under a real intelligent democracy.
But the literacy test is not enough. Government to-day is intricate and the duties of the voter are most varied and difficult. Very few Americans will hold it necessary to so restrict the suffrage that only a minority will be qualified to take part. But any American intellectually fitted to discuss this problem will presently come to hold, I believe, that the standards may well be raised. They should be so high that our more backward young people in the schools must be forced to strive diligently in order to fit themselves to attain this great privilege and responsibility.
It would be simple enough, in connection with our public school system, to establish boards of examination to pass upon prospective candidates. A majority of these boards should have had experience as school-teachers. They should have in hand thematter of providing facilities for educational preparation on the part of the student, young or old, who might wish to continue his school work in order to qualify for the use of the ballot.
The nature of the educational requirement, in my opinion, would have to do with two sorts of preparation other than the ability to read, write and speak the English language. First, we should demand an intelligence test such as is now required of every applicant for enlistment in the United States Army or Navy. These tests have been reduced to a high degree of scientific accuracy. The specific requirements would be somewhat different, of course, than those demanded for the admission to the Army or Navy, insofar as they would have a different object. But the principles should be the same. The purpose of such a test would be to reject all imbeciles, morons, and the mentally unbalanced. We now know that these groups number from ten to fifteen percent of our population. Placing the ballot in their hands amounts to the same thing as intrusting it to children from six years to fifteen years of age.
The second feature of our test should have to do with a different sort of qualification. The purpose of the intelligence test should be to reject those who are so lacking in natural intelligence as to be unfitted for the simpler responsibilities of life. Our second requirement would have to do with positive preparation. Any applicant should have a full measure of sound knowledge with regard to the history and government of the United States and current political and social problems. Unhappily not only many immigrants, Negroes, and illiterate native whites are at present unfitted to vote intelligently. I fear that an enormous percentage of quite intelligent, and in some respects well educated, persons are not in a position to pass the simplest examination upon the elements of ourhistory and government. Let me not be misunderstood here. I do not propose to limit the suffrage to those who are qualified to become judges on the bench or professors of history and political science. I would favor no standard so high that an intelligent young person could not fully prepare himself in a year, by careful study for a few evenings a week. The last two years of any efficiently graded school should furnish courses sufficient to prepare the student in these things. Indeed, any child completing his grade course where such studies were offered and required would naturally be considered as having measured up to this part of the suffrage requirement. His diploma on leaving school, properly attested, signed and publicly registered, should give him, upon arriving at the age of twenty-one, the right to vote. For children who have not been enabled, for any reason, to complete the grade school work, the necessary process seems simple enough. Evening classes or other means of preparation can be furnished them at any timeduring the years preceding voting age. Whenever they can pass the examinations they will receive the testimonial of proficiency, so there will be placed in their hands a most valuable and precious document entitling them to the sacred privileges and duties of an American enfranchised citizenship.
My basic contention in this matter is simply this: both our young people and our immigrants must be asked to fit themselves with the greatest care for the use of the ballot. I am agreed that a great many, native-born and foreigners alike, should be admitted to every other privilege and right of citizenship except that of the ballot. Nothing should be denied these except the power to degrade and destroy our government through ignorance and incompetence. The ballot is both a sacred heritage and sacred privilege. It must be recognized and appreciated as such. The scandal of the criminal use of the ballot by outright purchase is the primary source from which flows political corruption. A premium isput upon the achievement and honors conferred in the hearts of the people upon the successful politician regardless of the methods by which he attains success. Most recently this has broken out upon the body of the nation as a putrid sore, revealing within a systemic condition portending the decay and death of our democratic civilization.
Our American democracy, generally successful at first, has more recently left much to be desired. Even a hundred years ago, when we were a primitive, farming population, our victorious democracy had its seamy side. It brought with it every sort of inefficiency. It thrust upon the nation the diabolical spoils system, which is still so largely with us. Yet at that time democracy was saved by the very simplicities of our national life. To-day all is so different. It is time for democracy to tie up its loose ends and pull up the slack at every point. Our public problems to-day are most perplexing to the best informedminds among us. Our whole citizenship must not only acquire a degree of education in public affairs which no people has ever yet attempted—they must be reanimated by a spirit of sound morals and an intense desire to serve their country well. Otherwise no purely negative reforms can save our democratic system.
CHAPTER XXIV
National Solidarity Through Education
Indiscussing the public school system of the country there is little new for me to say. But the importance of the public school system in our democracy makes it necessary to state again and again the dependence of our government upon the public school. In the building of a peculiar civilization, the home and the church, as two necessary institutions of divine planting, have been everywhere emphasized. But in the maintenance of a democracy, a system of free schooling is as absolutely necessary as the home or the church. Democracy, however interpreted, must mean a leveling of all the people upward. Intelligence is essential to progress. There is no pathway to higher and better living except that which is illuminated by the light of a general intelligence. Our democracy must be taught to think, and taught tothink right, if it is to live. The nations that continue to grovel and grope, indeed, the nations that are being overwhelmed by internal revolutions and internecine strife, are all untaught or badly taught. I have been told that a hungry man near starvation has strange dreams of palaces and feasts. Untaught human minds, unfed by information, unstimulated by sound knowledge and undirected power of logic, have strange dreams. Communism, Sovietism, Bolshevism, Anarchy, are the nightmares of ignorance.
Our American democracy, in its earliest declarations, emphasized the necessity for the general public training of the children and the youth. Probably this was the real thought in the mind of Mr. Jefferson when he wrote his equality clause in the Declaration of Independence. Nothing he ever said has been so misinterpreted and misapplied. Certainly he could not have meant that all men are fundamentally and constitutionally equal. John C. Calhoun, themost logical mind in American history, except perhaps Hamilton, said that that would be a self-evident falsehood and not a self-evident truth. The great Lincoln said that there were physical differences between the African and the Anglo-Saxon that precluded political and social equality. No two things in the universe are equal in this impossible sense which has been distorted from Mr. Jefferson's statement that, "It is a self-evident truth that all men are created equal." Among the billion colored people of the earth, the black, the red, and the yellow, not one nation has ever developed and maintained a constitutional government. If there were equality in the essential things that go to make up the characteristics of the colored races, certainly during the ages there would somewhere have developed among them a civilization capable of producing an upright, dignified, independent manhood. All that this phrase meant at the founding of the republic, and all it means to-day, is equalityof opportunity for realizing the inherent possibilities that are locked up in human nature.
This, of course, contemplates a national school system into which all the children and the youth of the nation are to be brought to have their eyes enlightened, their hearts trained, and their ideals harmonized. So distinctly American must the public school system be that the young life of the nation, without respect to race, color or creed, shall be brought into it and subjected to its moulding and developing process. National unity and integrity cannot be maintained if a part of the nation is taught and a part remains in ignorance. A democracy must have uniformity and universality in the elementary training of its young life. Neither can the nation maintain its existence and work out its destiny if in its early training its youth is broken up into sectional, racial and sectarian groups.
Concessions have been made to foreign elements that have come into this country andorganized themselves into communities, holding tenaciously to the language of the country from which they came. The almost insuperable difficulty of undertaking to mobilize the American people in time of war had its roots in just this thing of permitting aliens to occupy the American soil, live under the American flag, and continue to teach the political loyalties of their respective countries in their own languages. It necessitated the draft law by which these people were compelled to bear arms in defense of the world's civilization. No thorough American required any sort of compulsion to put him into the great conflict. The right to volunteer in the time of national danger, or in defense of the great institutions of human liberty anywhere in the world, was the inheritance which had been transmitted from the Revolutionary period to succeeding generations until it came to us and to our children. We were denied our birthright when drafted for service in war, and in that fact there is a tremendous indictment of the nation for itsfailure to Americanize all its growing life through the public school system and the English language.
In every state of the union the Ku Klux Klan will insist upon thoroughly Americanizing the children of the nation through the public school. All the racial elements in the country must be brought under the same standard of tutelage. Only in this way can these peoples be harmonized. It was the idea of Cecil Rhodes when he founded scholarships in Oxford for American students that British and American ideals should be harmonized. The difficulty with Mr. Rhodes' idea is that the American youth are to be harmonized with British ideals, but he made no provision in scholarships in any great American institution to which British students might come and be harmonized with American ideals. The public school, however, contemplates taking all the elements that are represented in our vast population and harmonizing them with the ideals of our democracy. So poorly hasthis work been done in many sections of our country, and especially in our congested centers of population, the large cities, that the product turned out from the schools has frequently contradicted the purpose for which the system was founded. We cannot take a person of foreign birth or extraction into our schools maintained by taxation and turn him out Italian-American, British-American, Irish-American, Jewish-American, German-American, Japanese-American, Chinese-American or Afro-American. He must come out an American with all of his distinctive qualities and characteristics swallowed up and absorbed in American democracy. The institution was founded by the fathers and the pattern of American life was made by the great architects of human liberty, and every time a hyphenated American is turned out of any American school it is a contradiction of the very purpose of the republic.
This work of educating the youth of the nation must be done in the open. We haveno objections to the foundation of schools privately or by communities of peculiar racial distinction, or even by sectarians who, because of peculiar tenets, wish to keep their children under the eye of the church. To repeat what we have already stated, all we insist upon is just this—that these schools shall be in every sense public, open to public inspection. They must be subjected to regulation by properly constituted authority. The same courses in the fundamentals of Americanism must be taught in a privately owned or conducted school as in the public schools. Democracy can not be taught and developed behind closed doors. Its vital breath is openness. It has recently broken down many doors throughout the world. There are to be no more secret treaties, no more diplomatic intriguing, nothing between the governments of the nations upon which the eyes of all the world may not look. Surely, a democracy demanding openness in all the ways of mankind, as the nations move surely toward a common fraternity, can not undertake toconceal any part of its young life in its training for service to its country and to the world.
Holding as the Klan does that the tenets of Christianity as a code of morals are essential to our democracy, we are only too ready to agree that there should be distinctive religious training. Here, at the very threshold, there is a difficulty. Absolute freedom of conscience in religious matters is granted to American citizens. The public school teachers are drawn from various religious organizations, without respect to their church affiliations. In the average public school the children being taught represent numerous Christian sects and not a few non-Christian sects. It would be contrary to every fundamental of our national life to introduce specific religious doctrines or tenets among this diversified group. Perhaps the plan recently tried out in New York City would solve this problem. The children were dismissed from school a part of a day each week, that they might go totheir respective places of worship and there be taught by ministers or lecturers of their peculiar faith in the essential things of religion and ethics.
This much is sure: These foreign peoples must be unified in Americanism and it can not be done except through our public schools. North Carolina has adopted the slogan, "Abolish illiteracy in ten years." We should take that slogan for the whole American nation. By "literacy" we should mean literacy in English. This can only be accomplished, however, when native and foreigner, Catholic and Protestant, Jew and Gentile, gladly bring their children together and place them side by side to be taught in the things of democracy.
Demands have been made during the past few years that the funds collected in taxes for the maintenance of public schools be segregated. Our fellow citizens of one powerful religious organization have insisted that monies paid out by membersof that church in taxes for public education be returned to the denomination and applied to the parochial schools, which are owned and controlled by the church. Of course this means that a considerable percentage of the young population of the country would be withdrawn from the Americanizing schools of the public and trained only as the church directed. Church and state are forever separated in the democracy of America. Any tendency to bring them together in building the solidarity of the nation should be arrested. It is not worthwhile to experiment further in this matter. All history shows the utter futility of attempting to build a robust, virtuous, enlightened national life through union of Church and State; and I wish to say with the utmost composure, and speaking, I trust, for every real American, that not one dollar of public monies shall ever be diverted from the public schools for sectarian institutions. This declaration may sound explosive. Yet I hope it will give no offense to anybody. The sooner it is accepted as final, so much the sooner will a very real cause of difficulty and misunderstanding be removed.
A study of our history is fundamental to the construction and the maintenance of a sound national life. Thomas Carlyle once very correctly said that one cannot manage the present or predict the future except from an accurate knowledge of the past. All sectarian textbooks in histories, partisan textbooks or sectional textbooks, are naturally distorted and perverted. Men who hold tenaciously to a particular setting, given a religious truth or any other historical fact, have looked at their fellowmen through a distorted perspective. The trivial has frequently appeared to them to be the magnificent, and the magnificent the trivial. Bias has characterized all such narratives. It is difficult enough to secure a history of any country or its people in its political, economic, industrial and social development, that is basically true to the facts. The man who writes is apt to betremendously impressed by the age in which he lives. The tale that he tells is often a crude compilation of errors. Only recently the manuscript of a history in its making was tendered by a well known publishing house to a patriotic organization of the South for review. One of many glaring errors that obtruded from this book, which was designed to become a text book, was the statement that the democratic party originated with the original Ku Klux Klan of the Sixties. Another history in common use in the public schools of the country, filled with all sorts of inaccuracies and misstatements, was recently taken from the schools in one great section of the country. When the attention of the author was called to the inaccuracies, he offered to expurgate the offensive statements of which the section complained, but refused to change his history for other sections of the country where the statements were as yet unchallenged. If such histories are foisted upon our school system, and our children are taught the errors of the prejudiced and inaccurate historian, how much worse, and how much more dangerous, would the teaching be if the history texts are purposefully written by narrow sectarians, and the facts discolored by religious prejudice? The time has surely come when real history should be written by the truthful and wise, and the facts of our national virtues and vices, our strength and our weakness, our dangers and our securities, should be taught in our public schools, and taught to all the children. The preparation or selection of school text books in history is no more a fitting subject for rancorous bickering among sectarian politicians than the writing of text books in chemistry. It is entirely a matter for trained historians and professional teachers. We must insist that politicians of all breeds keep their hands far removed from these things.
CHAPTER XXV
The Conservation of the American Home
TheAmerican home is rapidly becoming a failure. After countless ages of biological and social evolution, that marvelous process of change and growth which has produced us, we are committing suicide as a nation and as a people. A home without children is not, in a social sense, a home at all. It is only a place in which, and a condition under which, two persons of opposite sex live together more happily and comfortably, perhaps less so, than they could do apart.
The American home, the home in which healthy, intelligent and characterful children are bred and reared, both for their own sakes and the nation's service—this home is the veritable rockbottom of our national well-being. Let the home fail, and all our wealth and material achievement is naught but poverty and trash.
The millions of homes in which there are no children, or only one child, the birth of which was perhaps wholly unintentional, are so many millions of tombs in which the nation's hope and future lie buried. The millions of young unmarried Americans, between the ages of twenty-one and forty years, whatever be the cause of their unnatural and unsocial condition, are just so many millions of Americans who have rejected life. All of the unmarried, all of the married who do not reproduce themselves, are a crushing accusation against our national intelligence, our national morals, and our national social policy. What do these figures not mean in terms of disappointment and despair, of social purpose unfulfilled, of negative sorrow and anguish in the heart of the individual, of souls unfed in terms of every higher realization of life?
A people which can calmly behold a large per cent of its marriageable young people homeless and childless has confessed itself to be a broken and dissolving remnantamong the nations. We, lords of the richest land in all the four quarters of the world, voluntarily place our national head upon the block and beckon to the executioner, axe in hand, to make haste.
Visualize this old-time American home—on the hillside, among the trees. For many generations it has stood foursquare against every blast of winter, every ugly aspect of circumstance. From its wide portals have gone forth a myriad of the young and gay, the hopeful and the brave. Its offspring peopled all our West. Its victories in the wilderness, through a hundred years, have no counterpart in all the history of humanity. The history of America has been the history of the American home—of what that home has accomplished for the citizens that were born and reared under its sheltering roof.
Open the door! Wait! You shall see none enter here. Only a going out—a funeral procession. A death march soundsforth, a mighty people, the hope of the world—such a people is borne to the grave. Where there is no laughter of children, there Death is King. And those that see make jest and frolic.
In the even scales of biological law and of mathematical calculation, our people are being weighed in the balance and found wanting. We Americans, all that we have been, and all that we are, are being borne to the grave in execution of the law. We have been tried and condemned by a just Judge.
It is a most dangerous error to undertake to build a national life on the individual as a unit. "God has set the solitary in families," said Moses, as he led his people through the vast wilderness unto the promised land. We may destroy all else, but leave the home and the family, and yet all the elements and works that make the nation can be once again regained and rebuilt. We may possess all else, wealth and power, all thearts and all the knowing, thriving schools and majestic temples—but if the home crumbles and decays, we perish with it utterly.
Oh! The deep, deep and terrible tragedy of our Nordic race in America! We have been decimated by fratricidal war. Our flesh and blood have been corrupted by industrialism. Now, however, we go to our destruction simply because we do not care to live. We go as blindly as a species of animals whose conditions of life have been completely upset by new forces with which they do not know how to deal. Sheep and swine, nay, the wild beasts of the field, could not act with such utter carelessness and immorality as we. All that we have done will perish with us. Other nations have lived and left record of their labors in a lofty literature or a resplendent art. The glory of the temples they have builded keeps their memory green centuries after their very language is forgotten. The people of the age of Pericles will live on in theirwork, to beautify and glorify humanity for twice ten thousand years. But we Americans are perishing miserably to leave no record of high value, because our greater work has been bound up in our very selves. We have all lived and labored together as free men. We have proven to a faithless world that the humblest toiler could wield the mightiest and most glittering scepter of power. We have made good the proud boast of a triumphant democracy. All that we have been, as a beckoning star among the nations, all that we have meant to the world of hope in the common man, is doomed to perish with us.
All I seek to do in these chapters is to bring the mind and heart of my country to this place. Here, in the old-fashioned American home, we shall do battle. Here we shall fight the last fight, to win or to lose. If we are to have a greater and better America, we must begin by breeding better Americans in larger numbers. There is no other way. The man who says our youngmen and women, in general, do not desire homes and children, says a falsehood. We neither desire nor expect fifteen children in the home. What we do insist upon, in recreating all the conditions about that home, is two, three, four, and sometimes, in exceptional cases, five or six children. For our country as a whole, during this century, we crave but a small increase in native born population in every decade—perhaps ten or twelve per cent. We would reject, by taking forethought and preventing marriage, the children of the criminal, the children of the imbecile and the insane, the children of those who are accursed with incurable diseases or incurable indolence. We would remould all that needs remoulding in order to receive into the hearts and the homes of our country the children of the healthy and the industrious, the honest and intelligent, the high-minded and the sensitive.
Give our young people of America but half a chance! Let them have their owncountry in which to test out the labor of their hands and the love of their hearts! Let them again lay upon themselves the first duty of the supreme law of nature! They can and will preserve to this continent every higher value, every article of faith left to their keeping. Remove from their environment a competition that is unfair and killing. Give them bread and not a stone for their toil. Give them solid assurance and not a gnawing insecurity of livelihood, and they will give to their country a future through the sons and daughters of their love.
To admit that there is a growing number of our young women who reject child-bearing as a burden is merely to re-emphasize the crying need of a socializing education. It is the work of those who know and who care, to teach those who are ignorant and careless of duty. We teach our young people that they must help prepare themselves for citizenship and self-support. Citizenship for our American young women includesthe essential duty of motherhood, and for our young men the duty of the creation and support of a family. A cornerstone of our ethical teaching should be the preparation of the minds of the young for home-building and parenthood. Every able-bodied man, or woman, who deigns to eat, should perform some sort of useful work. Similarly every normal young man and woman who accepts life should be gladly willing to create life. Around and above these homes and these children we must place the protection of every means furnished by applied science. To educate them and to fit them for useful work and public service, we must apply the first fruits of our nation's wealth. To offer to these young citizens, upon maturity, full opportunity for fruitful labor and self expression, we must be ready to reject much error that is ancient, and accept much truth that is new and sometimes startling.
America consists of and exists in the home. The home is America. To lose thefight here is to lose all. To win at this point is to win for ourselves national salvation, and for the world our share in its ultimate redemption.
A FINAL WORD
Letme confess that I alone am responsible for the reorganization of the Ku Klux Klan. No one suggested it to me. No one helped me in the formulation of its new task, nor in the working out of any of its basic principles or methods. So it may not be entirely uninteresting to the reader for me to close this statement with a brief narrative of the first growth of this concept in my own mind.
To begin with, my childhood fancies were much laid hold of by the stories I heard of the original Ku Klux Klan. These stories were told me in my own home. Sometimes in Negro cabins the old darkies would play upon my boyish mind with marvelous tales of the hosts of white-robed horsemen—the souls of the departed soldiers of the great war—who were used to ride up and down the countryside. Sometimes I would imagine these cavalcades passing swiftly and silently, like a white cloud,across the starry heavens. Later, when a more accurate book of knowledge of this strange epoch of American history was opened up to me, I eagerly devoured all the reading I could find pertaining to the subject. Yet the impressions made upon me by the legendary account never entirely lost their force. So, as I grew to manhood, my mind, perhaps overburdened while yet too young, with a sense of the responsibilities of citizenship, made the service of my country a deeply set conviction. I never went very joyously either to my studies or to my active duties. To my generation, as it grew up in the defeated, broken and impoverished South, the problems of life presented heavy tasks rather than stirring issues. We had to make all our beginnings as a people over again. Our mood was much like that of the Puritan founders of New England when they set themselves to struggle against the stern climate and the thin and unfruitful soil of their section. A statement of Robert E. Lee to a member of his staff the day beforehe surrendered at Appomattox has been more than once my sheet-anchor. "Captain," said our great leader, "I should gladly lay down my life, but it is now my duty to live. The way for me has been hard, very hard—no pathway of duty is easy—only those who have encountered obstacles, faced difficulties, and endured extreme hardships, know how much easier it would be for me to die, than to live in response to the call of duty."