Deeper Misgivings

THE ladies left us to our coffee and cigars; the dinner was over — a conventional little dinner-party for the newcomers in an exclusive New England summer colony. Testing the new infusions into that literary-artistic body must always be an anxious affair; but imagine the anxiety when it comes to trying out newcomers with alien names!

I had felt, throughout the dinner a slight, malaise pervading the party: there had been too guarded a choice of subjects of conversation, and the exchange of impeccably disguised glances of the examiners over our reactions could at times be intercepted. It happened that I, for one, among the guests was neither of immigrant stock, nor a titled foreigner, nor even a distinguished alien. I was — and my hosts must have ascertained this before inviting my family to dinner — a man who had been brought up much as they had been. I had had about the same education in about the same, if not in the identical schools and colleges they had attended, and had mixed in the same society. Had it been possible for me to say that my father had come over in the steerage, or that my mother had landed at Ellis Island dressed like a wayside Umbrian Madonna, the dinner-party might have been an easier affair; I could have been easily classified then.

It may have been the outward similarity with themselves, or it may have been the postprandial expansiveness that comes with coffee, which now put my hosts and their friends off their guard. ‘At yesterday’s town meeting,’said one of them,—apparently out of a clear sky, but actually in continuation of the general trend of repressed thought,— ‘at yesterday’s meeting they raised our assessments and voted to macadam the South End.’

You should know that by ‘they’ my host meant, and his friends understood, those Polish, Italian, and Finnish employees of the local mills who constituted a working majority in the town board which met in the shadow of the white-steepled Congregational Church of Middle Parish, Connecticut. They were American citizens,— duly authenticated as such, by a piece of paper with a red seal and the picture of a baldheaded eagle, — who had learned the ropes of the American political system even faster than the American language; they had the right to increase the taxes of the Dartmouth professor, of the Massachusetts architect, and of the New York novelist, who were my fellow guests, and to apply the money so obtained to macadam the South End, inhabited mostly by mill-workers.

My host’s political introduction opened the floodgates of discussion. For a few minutes I was forgotten; that is, the fact of my alien name was overlooked, and the talk was free and wholehearted. It was the unburdening of a people who felt, rather than clearly realized, that they, as a class, or as ‘the Old Stock,’ were being forced to the defensive. But what struck me here, as it had struck me in quiet talks at friendly gatherings and in club corners, was a certain lack of courage, a certain absence of virility and clear-thinking in facing and struggling with the issues underlying the anxiety and doubts in their minds. The ‘ reaction ’ of this Old Stock, which had won the wilderness and successfully challenged imperial oppression, seemed to have dwindled down to a compound of spiritual malaise and discouragement. All the discussion suffered from a lack of the blunt and robust, plain-speaking that one finds in the speeches and pamphlets of the Revolutionary period, and was at times almost insincere in its ‘editorial circumlocution.’ On the emotional side, the talk showed an underlying poor morale, in an exaggerated observance of ‘forms’ and a hesitancy about fighting back openly; on the intellectual side, it betrayed an absence of ‘horse sense,’ as the forefathers of these people would have called it; a lack of grasp of principles underlying questions, and a reliance upon simplicist — even foolish — ways and means of grappling with problems. Ideologies seemed to have supplanted ideas, theories to have driven out principles, statistics to have replaced history. At best, — and this applies to most of the books that have been written on the problem of the alien element in America, — the stress seemed almost wholly on the problems of immigration and naturalization; whereas the real problem, frankly and courageously faced, is the problem of the New Stock, of the millions of ‘foreigners’ born within the United States, and their ‘foreign’ children and grandchildren — that vast mass of us who are American citizens, but not Americans.

It is this fundamental difference between New-Stock and Old-Stock Americans that will be dwelt upon in this article, a difference which the legalistically minded will deride and assail as reactionary, but which nevertheless exists as a basic spiritual, mental, historic, and ethnic fact. For, deeper than the circumstance that this is our common country, both for you of the Old Stock and for us of the New, and that you who have built it strong and great cannot outdo us, who profit by your labors, in the desire to serve it — deeper than all this lie differences which do not divide us as American citizens, do not touch our common loyalty, but which exist and are profound.

Nationality does not mean or involve simply loyalty to the flag and willingness to serve it. Nationality in a state is much like personality in a human being; it is the resultant of influences far subtler and more removed than the accident of place of birth and naturalization, or even of teaching and earnest personal intent and devotion. It is the product of actions and reactions, — physical, intellectual, spiritual, — working slowly and cumulatively through decades and decades. You call us Americans, and such we mean to be; but we are not nationally so. The American nation and American civilization are not, as some persons to-day so glibly assert, the work of the last fifty years, when the vast majority of us and of our fathers joined you. All that is fundamentally and constructively, politically and spiritually, American was reared on these shores decades before our coming. We have simply utilized — some of us sordidly, many of us worthily, I trust — the great, structure already reared, drawn our strength and power from your a bound i ng strength and power, built our homes in the quiet and safety of a freedom achieved by you. The very most that some of us can claim is that the forbears of our stock fought in your wars, or joined your sons who died that the Union might live. But was there ever a simpler and clearer duty than this — that some of those who have received your bounty of freedom and opportunity should be willing to pay a part of the debt?

Yet all this has not made us, and could not make us, Americans. We of the New Stock have behind us a body of traditions different from yours; they are consciously present to some of us, culturally; they are powerfully active in all of us, unconsciously. Though many of us have trod no other soil but yours, yet has our spirit, through our ancestry, traveled across other lands than this. Such a body of traditions, consciously or unconsciously, is present visibly in the newcomer, in habits of life; it is present, in the second and in succeeding generations, invisibly, in habits of thought. The World War brought us face to face with differences which have always existed between us, but which either lay dormant, or dwelt restlessly, doubtfully, and indefinitely in your minds and ours. The fact is that what we of the New Stock build on is an entirely different foundation from that ‘ethnic and cultural unity’ of which your fundamental inst itutions are ‘the most durable expression’; and the truth is that, though ‘American’ is an ‘adjective of similarity’ applied to Anglo-Saxons, Irish, Jews, Italians, ant! Germans living in this land, yet it is a similarity of place and institutions, ‘acquired, not inherited, and hence not transmitted. Each generation has, in fact, to become Americanized afresh.'

When it is said that many of the aliens coming here contribute something precious to American civilization, it is implied that they bring something distinct from and novel to such civilization. In other words, it is recognized that something is added which, though it may improve the original heritage, will also tend to modify it. But is there anything really vital, really constructive to American civilization, which we of the New Stock have brought to you? Bear in mind that it is not what the individual of alien stock contributes that historically and sociologically counts; it is what is dumped upon you by the alien mass that tells. It is the insufficient consideration and valuation of the effects of mass on the history and social and spiritual life of America, which impairs the arguments and nullifies much of the effort and legislation spent on so-called Americanization. It is not the Jacob Riises, it is not the Mary Antins, or the Patris, the Boks, and the Yezierskas, — even if they were centuplicated, — who can affect the real problem or influence results: it is the mass — the vast inflow of some thirty-three millions of strangers of all races and their progeny, in less than a century, into American civilization, which is counting, and will count, as the supreme problem.

Nothing in historic record compares with this human flood; what comes nearest to it are those movements of population in Europe which history indifferently calls ‘invasions,’ or ‘barbaric irruptions’ into the Roman Empire. With due allowance for differences of time and of conditions of civilization, those ancient invasions and the modem migrations to America have much in common. Historians are pointing out that some of those irruptions of barbaric hordes were essentially mass-movements of population, even though a frightened civilized Europe called them a scourge of God. And it is significant that even the comparatively small German migration to our colonies, which resulted in the ‘Pennsylvania-Dutch ’ settlements, was likened by German writers to the inrush of the Teutonic hosts into the Roman Empire in the early centuries of our era. Indeed, they called such migration ‘die moderne Volkerwanderung.’

This law of mass and numbers is quite fully recognized in another of our domestic problems — that of the negro in the South. There it is realized that the descendants of the native white stock, except in some parts of Texas, live on the defensive among nine millions of blacks ‘whose mode of living tends, by its mere massiveness, to standardize the “ mind of the proletarian South in speech, manner and the other values of social order.’

No doubt, we are all hampered in the full recognition of the operations of this law of mass by moral considerations; but, as a recent historian has pointed out, — giving as an example the gradual extinction of the American Indian by the mass-invasion of the whites, — ‘ Man, in the individual treatment of his fellow, is, indeed, bound by the laws of justice and of right; but in the larger processes of history we are confronted by problems that the ethics of the individual fail to solve.’

That the future of the Republic might be endangered by the workings of this law of mass was present in the minds of the ‘Fathers,’ even though their descendants seem to have forgotten it. Thus, Thomas Jefferson, as early as 1781, asked whether ‘the present desire of Americans ... to produce rapid population by as great importations of foreigners as possible’ was really good policy. And in his answer he argued that ‘in proportion to their numbers they will share with us the legislation; they will infuse into it their spirit, warp and bias its directions, and render it a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass.’ Likewise, James Madison had occasion to express his misgivings. The country was discussing a bill for the naturalization of foreigners, based on the prevailing t heory of making admission to citizenship easy, so as to accelerate the settlement of vacant lands. But Madison had the courage to raise his voice against such rapid ‘Americanization’ processes, and called the attention of Congress to ‘considerations of a higher nature than those connected with filling up the country by an accession of mere brute numbers.'

Most of our current laws, policies, and opinions regarding immigration and the New Stock, however, give little or no consideration to this law of mass, but are based very largely on non-historic, purely economic, or, occasionally, sentimental reasons. At most, Americans are impressed by the physical or outward manifestations of the force operating under this law — by what they see at Ellis Island, by the East. Side, by the large blocks of illiterate voters. But how little heed do they give to its less obvious but more significant workings! I need not refer here to the subtler forms of change going on in American civilization; in all likelihood I should not be believed if I set forth some of them, inasmuch as there are no statistics or official data to ‘prove’ how men think and feel, and what they aspire to and hope for. So let us merely survey briefly a few of the more evident results of the alien penetration.

Thus, though there has never been in this country a distinctly political class, yet, except in a few cities, the conduct of government has been almost exclusively in the hands of the Old Stock. This is rapidly changing in both rural and urban sections. Questions of German or Italian frontiers have already actually affected electoral results in the United States.

So, also, while the machinery of government is not the government itself, yet it bears heavily upon its actions; and I ask, ‘Are you aware how rapidly the civil service is passing to a personnel of the New Stock?’ Politics has been, and still is, largely in the hands of lawyers in this country; now, it is not without significance that many of our foreign-born and of the second generation — especially from countries without any remotely Anglo-Saxon constitutional and legal traditions — enter the profession of law. In a report, of the Bar Association of New York in 1921, it is pointed out that in New York City, of a total of 10,563 male lawyers, 15 per cent are foreign-born and more than 50 per cent are either foreign-born or of foreign extraction. And the report goes on to say: ‘Many of these men come to the Bar with little knowledge of American institutions, and with little or no appreciation of those ideals and traditions which have in the past dominated the spirit of our AngloAmerican legal system. . . . The result is that the Bar is carrying an almost insupportable burden of a large membership unfitted by education or experience to bear its responsibilities, and without the inclination, which comes naturally from familiarity with our institutions, to maintain its traditions. In consequence, the Bar as a whole is suffering in its public reputation and influence, and its efficiency and its capacity to perform the public service, which is its primary duty, is diminishing rather than increasing.’

As it is with politics in the nation, as it is with the law in the Metropolis, so it is becoming in public educat ion in our cities. ‘Schools,’ it has been said, 4 present the phenomenon of ethnic compromises not unknown in Austria-Hungary: concessions and appeals to the “Irish vote,”the “Jewish vote,” the “German vote” compromise school committees, where numbers represent each ethnic faction, until, as in Boston, one group grows strong enough to dominate the entire situation.’

No wonder, then, that the ‘defense’ of American rights and of American liberties is becoming to-day a somewhat chorographic and a thoroughly legalistic appeal to the Constitution by men — often with Slav names, or names ‘Americanized’ by an ex-parte order of some judge — who read into it many legal terms and understand little of its spirit. No wonder that to-day an insinuating sophistry replaces historic fact and truth, and ‘establishes’ that America is not. American, but has always been a mongrel state. No wonder that anxiety lest one be thought illiberal allows erroneous and vicious theories to pass as legal tender, and grants respectability to dangerous and even droll sophisms.

What is the remedy? The answer, indeed any answer, can be considered and studied only after wc shall have divested ourselves of the burden of ideologies and false notions that warp our judgment on this great and intricate national problem. What is needed to-day is courage and plain-speaking, and putting an end to ret icences. This duty rests in equal measure on ihe Old Stock and the New; both have too long played with half-phrases, often with word-tricks and bathos, occasionally with falsehoods. You of t he Old Stock must read t he history of your country, and look into your minds and souls with clearer and braver vision; we of the New Stock must, strive to make you see our minds as they really work, and to turn our hearts to America as a heritage of ideas and accomplishments which are your patrimony, and which we may enjoy and consider only as a trust. If assimilation is impossible, who can say what wonderful things may be done by collaboration? Far better to know that, we are different, than to be satisfied with a counterfeit likeness. Above all, plain-speaking and courage! There has been a time in the history of the United States when brother had to fight brother, so that, the Nation might be kept ‘one and inseparable,’as a political body; the duty of keeping America spiritually one and inseparable transcends every other patriotic duty, both for you of the Old Stock and for us of the New. If this be treason, make the most of it!