A Family Letter

DEAR FELIX, —
I am sorry you are angry with me. You know that. You and I are the only members of the family left in this country, and we should stand together.
I don’t want to quarrel with you. I want to avoid a break with you if it is possible to avoid it. At the moment, I do not see how a break can be avoided. You insist that my open and active espousal of the cause, formerly of the Allies and now of the United States, exhibits a disloyalty to father, to Carl, and to the girls, which makes you ashamed of our good name. You are yourself absolutely loyal to the United States. I know that. You want me to be loyal. But you insist that my loyalty should be more or less passive. You think that I should buy Liberty Bonds, and if I were drafted (which is impossible since I am considerably above the age-limit), that I should serve in the army; but you declare that voluntary aggressive action on my part, to help defeat Germany, is disloyal to father and the rest of the family now living in Germany and in one way or another fighting for Germany.
I need not repeat what I think of your point of view. I completely disagree with it. I believe that family ties must not, in such a crisis, be allowed to impede the individual’s freedom of action. No ties of blood or birth should in any way be allowed to fetter his hands, his brain, or his spirit — least of all, in this nation, which is a conglomeration of many races and depends for its safety and strength, as no other nation in the world, on the speedy amalgamation of these races and the effacement of racial lines. An American may go to Italy, England, or Germany and live there all his days, remaining an American citizen, without especial loss to any one or anything except his own self-respect. Those countries, having each its own definite race, will suffer him as a self-indulgent expatriate, satisfied to live his days accepting protection without giving any service in return, even the small service of casting his vote once a year.
In the United States, however, the situation is different. With a wonderful generosity and a hospitality which has frequently threatened danger to the institutions on which this country is founded, the United States has opened its doors to every man, woman, and child in Europe, not a defective or a criminal, who cared to enter. It has done so, not from a sense of self-interest, but on principle. The United States has from the beginning been the refuge of the oppressed of all nations, the economically oppressed and the politically oppressed. Comprehending fully the problems which the coming of these hordes presented, she has nevertheless allowed them to enter with only slight restrictions, trusting that something that we like to call the American spirit would transfuse the different elements into a new metal more precious than any yet known. This American spirit was the spirit of individualism, the ardent and unhypocritical passion for freedom of thought and action, for religious and racial tolerance, for largeness of view, derived in part from the early colonists, in part from the Revolutionary patriots, in part from the pioneers and frontiersmen, in part from Lincoln and the men who defended the Union with him, in part from men like Carl Schurz, who knew what it meant to live under a government which feared freedom of thought and speech and crushed them down with gunbutts. The American people have trusted in the working of this leaven of the American spirit in the lump of alien population. On the whole they have been right in trusting to it. In an incredibly short period, foreign children have been turned into American citizens with a distinctly American outlook. The American spirit has wonderfully done its work in transforming the Russian, the Italian, the Pole, the Irishman, the German, the Jew, into that curious new being, not yet fully formed, the American. It has succeeded so well because it worked unimpeded. There were no forces in operation to retard its working.
The Great War has brought home to us with a startling shock the realization that, unknown to the great majority of the American people, a foreign government has for the past fifteen or twenty years been slowly constructing machinery to counteract the assimilative potencies of this American spirit. Through the schools, through the churches, through the colleges and universities, through associations of school-teachers, through athletic, social, and literary clubs, organized and closely bound together into a highly centralized alliance; and lastly, and most effectively, through the daily and weekly papers, religious as well as secular, this government has been endeavoring to consolidate the largest and on the whole the most respected and most trusted portion of our population, of foreign birth or immediate foreign origin, into a solid mass organized, not only to prevent its own assimilation, but also to work actively toward its own political predominance, first in the State and later in the nation. I refer, I need not say, to Germany.
Whenever, in my more or less heated conversations with you during the past three years, I have made any statements concerning the German conduct of the war, you have answered that I was a victim of the anti-German propaganda which England had been conducting in this country in the interest of Wall Street, for years, even before the war. If there has been such a propaganda, it has been a monumentally stupid one, for, so far as I know, it has never called public attention to the most subtle and insidious case in history of one nation’s interference in the internal affairs of another. You know as much as I of Germany’s attitude toward her expatriated nationals. You therefore know about her ‘centres of influence’ idea, her resolution, expressed in a national policy, to keep loyal and serviceable to the German Empire the millions of her citizens who, for one reason or another, have emigrated to different parts of the world, principally to North and South America. Under pretense of keeping alive in the hearts of her ‘exiled’ sons and daughters the cultural ideals of the Fatherland, the German government has organized in different countries, notably in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, and the United States, elaborate ‘systems’ designed, on the one hand, to prevent these nationals from amalgamating with the peoples among whom for their own material advantage they have chosen to live, and, on the other, to create and spread doctrines favorable to the German government.
In the United States, the influential social, athletic, and other clubs have been firmly knit together into the National German-American Alliance. The even more influential teachers of German in the schools have been organized into an Alliance of Teachers. This alliance is subsidized by the German government. I need not suggest that this subsidy is not granted merely for sentimental reasons or for the benefit which the German government expects the American people to derive from the spread of Teutonic culture. It is granted because Germany realizes that these teachers of the German language can exercise an enormous influence in spreading the gospel of German cultural superiority and general infallibility, and will exercise it if given a start under pro-German auspices. In many schools in Wisconsin, Nebraska, and other mid-Westcrn States, the study of German in the public schools has, through the influence of German voters, been made practically compulsory. Children of strictly American parents may not want to study German, and the parents may protest, but in towns or cities where the school commissioner happens to be German, their protests are likely to be swept aside, or skillfully argued out of court. The teacher of German naturally begins his work by telling his pupils the advantages of learning German rather than French, Italian, or Spanish. He preaches the glories of Germany’s past and present, the splendors of its literature and art. He teaches German, but through it, constantly, he teaches Germanism. To the best of his ability, he does what his colleagues in the German Volkschule and Gymnasium are doing, under the strict supervision of the Imperial Minister of Education. He moulds, out of the pliable clay of youth, docile and unquestioning admirers of Germany and all its works.
He is, of course, ably abetted in this work by confederates on every side. The pastor in the German church is one; the editor of the German language newspaper is another; the father of the family, who, influenced by the pastor and the editor, emphasizes the sacred duty of keeping up the German language and the German traditions and fails to emphasize the higher duty of becoming, first of all, a loyal American citizen is a third.
All aliens tend to be clannish, and the Germans in this country have kept more to themselves, possibly, than the nationals of any other European country. You know how it was in our own family. All father’s and mother’s friends were German except the M—s, and our intimacy with the M—s was due primarily to the accident that they happened to be our nextdoor neighbors. You remember that, after we moved away, we saw little of them, except on that annual occasion, Christmas Eve, when they always came, loaded to the gunwales with presents, to celebrate with us, German-fashion. Your friends were largely in the German set, though you, like the rest of us children, had been born in this country; and all the men who called on the girls were German. You remember, we spoke of it at the time, fifteen years or more ago. The girls did not seem to care for American men, and American men did not seem to be drawn to them, though they were unquestionably attractive, and Pauline was, I think, one of the cleverest hands at repartee that I ever heard. Counts and barons besieged her, but Americans somehowkept away or were gently pushed away — I never could quite decide which. And the girls were both born in America and had both attended American schools.
The trouble, I suppose, was that the atmosphere of our household was absolutely German, and American boys felt shy in it, out of their element, embarrassed to know exactly how to act. Father, in insisting on keeping our home as German as possible, was, we know, acting from the highest sense of loyalty to his German origin. I cannot help feeling, however, that he made a great mistake. He became an American citizen and a most conscientious supporter of good government in his city as well as his nation. At the time of the Spanish War, you remember, he was ardently pro-America and indignant at the assumption of his relatives in Germany (who were pro-Spain) that he should be anything else.
We had a wonderful home, and there are a thousand memories of things distinctively German which I cling to, gratefully. I need not tell you that. The memory of those Christmas Eves is something always to treasure, and there were countless Sunday parties, including always the whole family and troops of friends, parties lasting from one to ten (when father wound up the clocks), with Volkslieder and games and good, lively talk, that neither you nor I will ever forget or ever want to forget. Our home was the best sort of home a boy could have, but the insistence morning, noon, and night, that it be above all, a German home, has, so far as our family life is concerned, had tragic results. Father and mother and the girls returned to Germany to live. Mother died almost immediately; the girls married German officers; Carl, of course, was altogether German anyway. His schooldays in Germany definitely settled that. You, having had a part of the same training, were half German. I, coming at the tail end of the family and going to American schools, and particularly to an American boarding-school, became somehow Americanized. I don’t know exactly how it happened, but the fact remains.
I went to Germany as often as the rest of the family, but I never made any friends there. German boys and American boys, I found, looked at almost everything under the sun from different angles, and my angle happened to be the American angle.
I said a minute ago that the results of the insistence on Germanism in our home had been tragic. Look at our family to-day. Father has a son and two sons-in-law active in the German service, and two sons who are American citizens. The girls, born in America and living in America until they were twenty-five or over, are married to Germans. You know as well as I how ardently American they were at heart. Imagine what they must be suffering to-day; for love for the country where they were born and bred will come through! Carl, of course, always has been German. You and I are the only ones left in America, and even we seem to be hopelessly divided. If this is not a tragedy, in a family that cherished unity and get-together festivals as ours did, I don’t know what tragedy is!
It was not the German government that was responsible for this particular wreck. It was mainly clannishness and sentimentality — clannishness, which prevented us as a family from striking our roots out into true American soil, having Americans as our daily companions and the guests of our Sunday parties, instead of always German bankers and merchants and reserve officers and traveling noblemen; sentimentality, which loved to insist that we were good Germans after all, and which prevented father from ever buying an inch of American land, because he wanted at any and every time to feel foot-free to return to Germany. Clannishness and sentimentality — the futile looking backward to a happy state which never was — are prominent vices of the German. They existed before the German government began, some twenty or more years ago, to take a lively interest in her future in America. Germany recognized the existence of these vices and used them for her own purposes.
The propaganda of the German government began in this country, as I said, some twenty years ago. Prince Henry and the German exchange professors were factors in it, the GermanAmerican Alliance and the German language press have been its active and vigorous supporters, and unquestionably the German Embassy and its confidential agents have done their share. The aim of this persistent and effective propaganda has been to counteract the forces that make for the assimilation of aliens in the body of American citizens — principally, of course, to counteract the forces that were making loyal Americans out of Germans who were willing to forego the privileges of life in Germany for the sake of the greater freedom of action and opportunity which the United States offered.
the point of view of the German government there is perhaps nothing reprehensible in her attempt to do this. For many years Germany lost thousands of industrious citizens annually by emigration to countries whence she could derive no benefit from the bodies and minds she had reared. Germans practically refused for one reason or another to emigrate to German colonies. In the United States, on the other hand, were millions of men and women of German birth or blood, whose integrity and efficiency were benefiting, not Germany, but the United States. They could be made to benefit Germany only in case they could be consolidated into a more or less compact political body endeavoring assiduously to spread German influence, both cultural and political, to control schools, churches, newspapers, and legislatures, and gradually to supplant the AngloSaxon influence in American life with the Teutonic.
It was, as I said, natural that the German government should want to do this. It is natural also that the American people should rise in wrath, as I hope they will, when they finally discover the impudent attempt that has been made to pervert the natural current of American political life.
For Germany’s attempt to solidify her nationals in the United States into a definite political body, with interests apart from the interests of the rest of the American people, is a blow straight at the heart of the American democracy. America’s promise lies largely in the fusion of many races in the hot fire of a common dream. Russian and Jew, Austrian and Pole, Britisher and Irishman, Frenchman and Prussian, have in America forgotten national feuds and prejudices, seeing a vision of liberty and fellowship and equal opportunity, against which the merely national aspirations of the past seem puerile and pompous and empty. Allow the Germans to solidify themselves into a political group, jealously guarding and insidiously extending their influence, and you must allow the Poles, the Italians, the Hungarians, the Irish, the Russians, to do the same. We should become a second Austria, where, in Parliament, the Magyars throw inkwells at the Czechs. The vision we hold and cherish would go off into thin air. Liberty and fellowship and equality of opportunity would be forgotten in futile squabbles about language or subtle racial prejudices.
Our language is English, our institutions are modifications of English and Teutonic institutions, touched up with French philosophy. They are not perfect, by any means, but they are a good foundation on which to build. Our culture, what there is of it, is largely a reflection of England’s. We do not brag about it, but we do not want to supplant it with German culture; we emphatically do not want to have it surreptitiously thus supplanted. We want to learn much from Germany; but we want to learn possibly even more from France and Russia. We want culture rammed down our throats, however, by no one.
You and I are both of the same German blood. There is not a drop of any other blood in us, so far as I know. You feel the tug of this blood drawing your sympathies toward Germany. Perhaps I am hard-hearted. I often wonder whether that is it. I think, however, that I feel as deep affection for father and the others in Germany as you do. And yet there does not seem to me to be the smallest corner of me that is not for America, first and last, and against Germany. I do not hate Germany, but I want to see her defeated, and I deeply hope that America will have a part in defeating her and that I may have a small part in helping to defeat her.
You believe that I should be passive, that, in deference to father and the family, I should at least have the grace to keep silent and to do no more than loyalty to the United States absolutely demands to help defeat Germany. You wanted me to keep silent, to be passive, after our first violent disagreement after the sinking of the Lusitania. You pleaded with me again and again during the twenty months or more that intervened before the final break, to take no active part against Germany. I tell you, Felix, too many Americans of German blood have been passive. Bound to Germany by ties of sentiment and bound to America by ties of self-interest, they have stood aside, afraid fearlessly to choose one side or another, to stand and fight for America or to stand and be interned for Germany. This is not a good war for neutrals. The issues are too clear. In times like these we cannot afford to let the lesser loyalty of the family or the tribe interfere with the larger loyalty due the country that has protected us and given us happiness and the opportunity to achieve success; or the loyalty, even wider yet, which is due to the principles of justice and liberty on which this country rests. The German propagandists have tried to persuade us that we, American citizens of German blood, can serve two masters. You and I should know better. Our own family is a perfect symbol of what this America of ours would be if Germany should be allowed to continue her insidious propaganda. This country would be split into fragments as our family is now split, the members torn from each other and each member torn within himself. Germany must be beaten, her government must be thoroughly discredited, not only in order that the democracies of the world may be made safe from attack by her armed forces, but in order also that they may be made safe from attack by the sappers and miners of her destructive propaganda. That propaganda is, in the long reckoning, more dangerous than all Germany’s armies. There is a room in Strand House, London, filled with nothing but examples of German propaganda written in every language and almost every dialect, and working through practically every sect of every religion in the world. Such a poisonous tree cannot be pruned or sprayed. It must be dug up by the roots and burned.
You think that I am disloyal. There seem to be times when a man must renounce father and mother, brother and sister, in order to be loyal to something higher than blood relatives. Fifty years ago Lincoln said that this country could not exist half slave and half free. To-day we can say with equal emphasis that this country cannot exist half alien and half American. It must be all American, with one language, one literature, one culture growing naturally from the original root. You say that you are loyal if you are merely passive, and some fool in Washington, some official or other, said the other day that the government demanded no more than passive loyalty from its citizens of German birth or origin. I tell you, that passive loyalty to-day is disloyalty. You are needed, and I am needed, and every American of German blood, who considers himself an American and nothing else, is needed, to symbolize to the rest of Americans of alien origin, the working of the American crucible. We have boasted in the past that the American people was not merely a hodge-podge of fifty or a hundred races, but a new race, looking not to the past but to the future. Here is our chance to prove it, to prove that no temptation, however great, no lure, however insistent, can turn us who have received the benefits of American citizenship, who have lived and grown and prospered and been happy under American institutions, back to the land that our fathers left, back to the kings they renounced. We dare not be passive.
The basic principle by which the American people has grown great has been brought in question by the German-Americans. Are we merely an agglomeration of European expatriates, or are we a new people, richer in promise, as we believe, than any race which has yet existed? On men like you and me depends in this crisis the answer to that question. We are of German blood and only of German blood. We have brothers fighting for Germany. The temptation is great to say, ‘I have a right to sit back and take no part in this conflict against my own blood.’ But the greater the temptation, the greater the necessity to stand unflinchingly by the principle which other Americans of German blood have put in jeopardy. If you and I — who have brothers fighting in the armies of Germany — make clear unmistakably that we stand ready, with every thought in our minds and every spark of energy in our bodies, to fight for America against Germany, will not the hundreds of thousands of other Americans of German blood, who are held to Germany only by ties of faint sentiment, be ashamed to hold back? The very tragedy of our position enforces a deeper loyalty upon us, because it makes so much greater our opportunity to serve
Instead of being passive, instead of sitting in armchairs at home, grumblingly nursing our resentment as you would have us do, you and I should be out on the housetops, declaring to the German-Americans our faith in the American democracy and the American people. Seeing how much we are willing to sacrifice for the privilege of claiming full American citizenship, other German-Americans, who have less to sacrifice, may value American citizenshi
Felix, you and I and men who are situated like us — there are not many — have a great responsibility. We can sit back passively, priding ourselves on our petty family loyalty which, in the greatest crisis in the world’s history, keeps us smug and neutral within our own four walls; or we can claim the higher allegiance and, because of all that we leave behind, work as few are privileged to work, for the unity and strength of our country.
You know what I have chosen, and in a rash moment you told me that in so choosing I was dishonoring my father’s name. Think again, Felix! What are you going to choose ?
Your affectionate brother,
R.