No. 38 Becomes a Citizen

I

‘NUMBER 38. Come in with your witnesses.’ It is my examination for the second paper which means that, if everything goes well, after a statutory period of ninety days I shall become an American citizen. ‘Do you know the Constitution of the United States?’ ‘Do you believe in it?’ ‘Do you know why we celebrate the Fourth of July ?’ ‘Can you read English? Read here.’

‘We hold these truths to be selfevident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.’

‘Do you believe in these principles?’

‘Yes, I do.’

The questioning goes on. The examiner looks straight at my eyes. Yes, I do believe in the democratic form of government. It is just because I believe in the principles of the Declaration of Independence that I left my native country, Italy, of my own will seven years ago. Of course I don’t say this to the examiner. He has no business with my private affairs; it is a routine job for him to take in new citizens. I can see a long row of men and women all waiting to have their numbers called. Like me, they are already uprooted from their own country and not yet Americans. ‘Do you give up your allegiance to your former country?’ ‘Yes, I do.’ ‘Are you willing to bear arms for the defense of the United States?’ ‘Yes, I am.’

It is a very strange thing to acquire the citizenship of a new country: something like taking a new father and mother. There is no doubt that the natural destiny of every man is to live and die in the land where he was born, among the people of his own language and tradition and customs. How strange it would have sounded to me if, only a dozen years ago, I had been told that one day I might give up being an Italian! I would have said that to leave one’s country is a great calamity, a fateful decision that no one could take unless compelled by the utmost necessity. I would have said that I hated Fascism, yes, but that not to share the destiny of the other Italians was an act of arrogance for anybody not in danger of his life; and that as long as it was possible to stay and exert some influence it was better to live a hindered life at home than to look for shelter abroad.

Yet here I am — answering questions in an English which is fluent but still heavy with Italian accent; I earn my living by lecturing in English, thanks to the understanding of my students; I write in English, thanks to friends who still occasionally look over my use of prepositions. In a few months I may be traveling in Europe with an American passport. In Europe, but not in Italy. For several years I have had no passport, as the Italian Consulate in New York refused to give me any document except one good to take me back to Italy and keep me there. During these years I have been what is called a political refugee, an expatriate.

I know exactly the date and the hour when I first realized that all this was bound to happen. It was the night of April 30,1928, in the police headquarters of a small town in Central Italy. I had been brought there, not in a regular state of arrest, but to be questioned — or, as it is said, under protective custody. In deference to my professorial dignity I had not been locked in a cell, but was invited to spend the night in the office of a clerk, with the door open and two policemen watching from the corridor. I sat at the desk, smoking and looking out of the window until after dawn. I had been caught. They could not pin anything specific on me, yet their hand was on my neck. It was not a violent hand. Rather, it was trying to push me with impatient clumsiness in the right direction. Could I not, with a positive act of repentance, clear up all malevolent rumors, establish my reputation, and, together with my countrymen, proclaim that the Duce is always right?

That pressure had been going on for years, but privately, coming through the channels of friendship or comradeship. From that night on it was going to be exerted by policemen. The police of a dictatorial country, to keep themselves busy and the opponents scared, can do little more than invent plots: it is their own naïve blundering way of giving bodily reality to the unfathomable crime of thinking. The police do not know individuals, but want to build up cases. My case was very simple: could I change my mind? Otherwise there was going to be trouble. The pincers of the ‘ either-or ‘ were closing on me. The grip on my neck was the cold metallic one of the system, and it is difficult to reason with a system. One thing was sure: that the police were going to stiffen my determination and that from that night on my way of thinking was going to mould my way of living. That night I knew.

At the bottom, I thought, it was a quite simple matter. I had been so far an Italian citizen devoted to his country. Now the police in their rough way were serving notice on me that my citizenship was going to be forfeited unless I strengthened it by taking a second one. To be an Italian was not enough: one had to become a Fascist. An Italian insisting that the old citizenship was good enough for him was a man without security and without rights. I could not become a Fascist. I could not swear allegiance to the Duce. I knew that night that in due course of time Fascism was going to make an alien of me. I did not know that in a few years I should have sworn allegiance to the American Constitution and called Italy my former country. But I knew definitely, when the sky over the Piazza, out the window of the Police Headquarters, was all brightened by the fresh clarity of (he Italian dawn, that my moorings had been cut and that I was on the move.

II

Now I am becoming an American citizen. I pass through the first questioning, but I have to wait before going through a second one; and after that I have to wait again and go through a third. Each time they ask me something or put some stamps on my papers. What I heard from a man at dinner a few nights ago comes to my mind: ‘To an intellectual it must not be hard to shift allegiance from one country to another. An intellectual is a citizen of the world.’ I like to remember these words now: they sound so silly. I don’t know if anyone here, waiting to pass the first, the second, or the third examination, calls himself a citizen of the world. And I don’t know how other intellectuals may feel in this moment. I know my own feeling. I know that I had a country — Italy — and now I have put the final seal on the fact that I have lost it. That is all.

This means that I am definitely estranged from the land, the sky, the culture, in which I have lived. Of course there are always good men around, ready to preach about citizens of the world and culture that survives exile — nay, that lives out of exile. I wish I could pat my shoulder and congratulate myself on the little bit of Italian culture that I have brought to new life over here. But unfortunately the American is adult enough in me to scent the bunk. The truth is that my roots are cut, and that whatever Italian sap is left in my nature is living out of contact with the Italian earth. What is the use of tracing down the origins and the responsibilities? Fascist intolerance worked hand in hand with my stubborn sense of self-respect. I don’t regret it. I would do it again. I could not become a Fascist. I became an American. Therefore Italy is my former country. The Italian culture is my former culture. These are facts.

There are people who say, ‘ But after all, things may turn out differently, and you will be back some day.’ Things may certainly become different in Italy, but one cannot change his country as he changes his shirt. It is a great privilege to become an American. All these routine ceremonies are not exactly formalities or red tape. The two friends who are here with me to testify about my moral character are not professional witnesses picked up in the street. They are real friends. I am in a large group of friends over here, a community which is growing out of the work of each one of us, and mutual confidence, and common beliefs. It did not cause me any trouble to become an Italian; but my becoming an American is my own work. To me these ceremonies are a reality which is of my own making. No, I don’t imagine I will undo in the future what I am doing today.

I shall go back perhaps, if things change over there, as an American tourist. I shall make a tour all over Italy some day, lecturing about the spiritual congeniality and the traditional friendship between the Italian and the American people. In my dotage I may possibly listen complacently to some chairman who will introduce me as a symbol of culture that survives hard times, as one of those migratory birds that bring the seeds of spiritual and learned life across the boundaries that nature or man has designed, back and forth, back and forth. Shall I have forgotten then all the comrades of my youth, all my Italian friends who were so worthy of survival? Some of them were murdered by the Fascists — murdered because they were the best of all of us. Some committed suicide. Some are in jail for the rest of their life or the life of the régime. Some have become functionaries of the régime. Two or three are living a pale decent life over there: all that is left of a group of men who were just facing the twenties when the régime started — brave young men who wanted to do good work for a civilized Italy.

No, all that was my Italy is gone. By accident, I suppose, I came over here and found work and made friends. In all truth, I do not have to give up any citizenship: I have remade myself over here, and now I am going to receive my certificate. I have not even friends left in Italy who may marvel or be shocked at my swearing allegiance to a foreign country — with the possible exception of two, in their graves, the youngest of us all, who died at nineteen in the war. One of them was a Zionist, the first Zionist I had ever known. He used to say that the Italian Jews owe a double loyalty to Italy, since Italy, he said, is the only country entirely free from antiSemitism. In the rout of Caporetto he held together a group of disbanded soldiers and fought, as long as he could, his rear-guard fight. One day he was surrounded but refused to give up. A Hungarian chaplain blessed his grave: he said that he had never seen a man die so bravely. Now they have discovered in Italy that the Jews simulated patriotism during the war, so as to spread more shrewdly their sinister influence.

Of course, there is physical Italy that is left. They cannot change it; they can scratch something here and there, tear down a few buildings in the centre of Rome, or plan a new quarter in almost every city. They want to give a Fascist tinge to the civilization, even to the landscape of Italy. It is hardly so sacrilegious as it is grotesque. The reality of Italy is in its earth and in its sky. The monuments, the works of art, reach beauty when they make visible the unity between the two. The sky can make plausible and proportioned almost anything, the earth can transform in its own way all traditions and intentions. There is so much history piled up in Italy; yet one can realize the beauty of Italy without knowing history. Nowhere else are the eyes more gratified; yet a blind man, I think, by breathing the air of Florence and Taormina can feel that these are two unique spots under the sun. That earth and that sky can take and melt away anything. In a way, in Italy, history and even art have less importance than in any other country: the particular Italian mark is not that of any single era or of a group of arts, but of eternity.

I think I can still scent the odor of the Laguna in certain corners of Venice and feel how I breathed when my lungs were filled with the air of Tuscany. I certainly have still vivid in me the exalted yet poised sense of the absolute that on a clear morning the sky of Rome can give. But all these recollections will inevitably fade away; they are already recurrent obsessions that my instinct tries to avoid. The fall in New England is becoming almost as familiar to me as the autumn in Rome. The stirring rhythm of life in New York multiplies the strength of my nerves and keeps me going. The direct, humorous man-toman comradeship that one finds all over this country has become like a fluid in which I am accustomed to live. That man who asked all the questions about the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence had a good one on me when the examination was over. ‘Doctor,’ he said, ‘could you please make your signature over here so that somebody could read it? You see, the people who come to this place are usually not so highly educated, but they all know how to write their names.’ He was a nice, friendly-looking man. We smiled broadly at each other.

III

In the list of the prospective citizens invited to call at the Immigration Office of the Southern District of New York on June 21, 1939, I have the number 38. Among all men and women I know over here there is not a single one, I suppose, whose American origins cannot be traced back to a number like my 38 obtained in some way for an identical purpose. This is why, perhaps, I feel as if the wrench of being uprooted from Italy were soothed by a sense of homecoming.

Of course, I could have become an English or a French citizen. I can almost see what would have happened. In England I should have been pigeonholed somewhere, after a careful weighing of my behavior and breeding. Over there even the natives are stamped according to the accident of their birth and the mode of their education; and certainly in the English social structure there is generous room for the aliens who become naturalized British subjects — particularly if they know how to keep their place.

In France I should have floated somehow among Parisian and cosmopolitan intellectuals. These people are called métèques over there — which means, approximately, international mongrels. At the margins of French society the métèque can spend his life in great freedom, as long as he can draw sparkles from his wits and protection from some cabales.

In America it is different, almost incredibly different. Here where the traces of the old countries are still visible in everybody’s names and traits it is extremely hard to remain an alien. One can, of course, but only by secluding himself in some ghetto of the unassimilated. The country which has been made by immigrants is at the same time the most impatient toward immigrants. If the aliens want to have any chance they have to become Americans, to adjust themselves to American ways of thinking and behaving. They are graded not according to a stable hierarchy but rather to the criteria of the race track: they have to run, no matter what handicaps are imposed on them. A Wop has to overcome more handicaps than a pure Anglo-Saxon, therefore he has to run twice as fast, or else he will be treated forever as a Wop. An alien, if he wants to have a chance, has to mix in some church or lodge or trade-union, just as, if he knows how to take care of his interests, he has to find his way into some political organization.

However, the assimilation of the aliens, imperative as it is, is not a wholesale process, and its happy outcome in each individual case is not a foregone conclusion. I know people who were born in this country and who feel and behave and are treated like aliens. I know people who almost the moment they land are recognized by men here as congenial fellows. In Europe the commonplace is still running that considers America as a hodgepodge of all races and creeds and ideas, something that will possibly coalesce into some unity and shape but only in a future still far away. The truth seems to me exactly the opposite. In order to be fully admitted to the American community one must prove himself to have an American character and bent of mind. Which means, to put it broadly, that this country is made for natural-born Americans, and that Americans are born, not made. Not all the natives, of course, are what may be called natural-born Americans, and not all the natural-born Americans become citizens of the United States. But the natives, and to an infinitely minor degree the aliens, are offered the chance of reaching the American type and of keeping it alive.

I remember when this unique American character first glimmered to me, the day I landed in New York. I remember my pride in looking at what men had done by rushing and pushing and gambling, with motives all muddled in self-interest: the result was New York. I remember the sense of human patriotism that I felt then, for the first time; later on, knowing the country, crossing many of its sections, I felt that sense over and over again. In England one admires the English people, its kings and noblemen and merchants; in Italy one loves the Italian nature and the Italian gods. In the United States one is impressed only by men and men and men. Plain men who came here as uprooted immigrants, all of them. No giants or gods or heroes: the only approximation to heroes are those great millionaires or public figures whom every third-rate journalist can debunk. The American character consists in this cheerful willingness to live and work in a society made of plain men — a society that gives a chance to individuals because this is the best way to get work done by them, and because it has a wisdom of its own that seems to be the ingrained experience of the human herd that tries here to rule itself.

In Europe the life of men is at the same time limited and protected by the tangible signs of the past. The streets we walk through, in the old country, direct the steps of our life. In New York, I was told, where there is now SaksFifth-Avenue there was open country a century ago. What will be standing fifty years from now, or in what direction the onrush of life will move ahead in a century, no planner of the city of tomorrow can tell. Everything is provisional and tentative. The spick-and-span car of today will be junk in a few years. With little or no direction coming from the past, the enormous mass of human beings is always on the move, rolling on according to its own weight and instincts — an ocean of men. Those who with gusto plunge into such an ocean and its currents and undertows belong to this country. The others, the eternal aliens, are dragged along and pushed around, having a very hard time.

It is good to live in such a country. It is different from all other countries at least in this respect, that it is not defined by a peculiar set of hierarchies and traditions, but by a particular attitude toward life. The citizenship of the United States is the appropriate document of identification for men who find a hard pleasure in starting life anew, men sharpened by the individual will to survive and by the instinct of the herd — plain men.

‘We hold these truths to be selfevident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.’ These words I have to pronounce loudly, in order to prove that I can read English. I am a little uneasy: I don’t know really whether it is true that all men have been created free and equal. Perhaps it is, but if they don’t defend their birthright I know that their lot can become miserable. What I do know is that the uprooted men who made this country have created a setting, a condition of things that makes it possible to do something for freedom and equality.

IV

I think I know this country well enough not to be swayed by any Fourth of July optimism. I earn my living by teaching what is called political philosophy, which (I answer when I am asked, What is it?) is something between Plato and Jim Farley. I am getting more and more familiar with the hard realistic Jim Farley way of turning things around. I don’t think anybody has to teach me about Mayor Hague or Hearst or Tom Girdler: I know almost everything that has been written about these gentlemen who generously provide test cases for the defenders of civil liberties. I know about Senator Reynolds and the antialien sentiment. I have read everything I could about share-croppers and labor spies and labor rackets. The Grapes of Wrath is still on my desk.

I know about the ways of intolerance in this country, and what life was like in the twenties under Prohibition. I have met some dozen Babbitts and more than one Elmer Gantry. And certainly I have met here, among native Americans, Fascist types and countless men and women of no convictions at all who were ready to jump into the first wagon hitched to a faraway star. All European diseases and conditions for diseases I have found over here in large or small samples, and some more which are specifically American. And how could it be different? There is nothing superhuman about this country and this people.

It is only too natural that all germs and pollutions which may affect the human breed have found their way and some chance over here. Sometimes these germs neutralize each other. Racial or religious intolerance may take ominous forms in Alabama, but will not easily combine with the brand of intolerance which is preached in Michigan. In some other instances intolerance has taken the character of a disease that by its recurrence has lost something of its deadly power. There is a definite limit to what the country can tolerate in the way of labor troubles or red-baiting. Men with some good qualifications for becoming dictators or tyrants have been rapidly blown to pieces by the mercilessly used technique of bunking and debunking.

This homespun wisdom, this shrewd biological health of the American people, is the instinctive wisdom of that part of the race which in one way or another has so far managed to keep itself free from monarchies, from state-enforced religions, from dogmas of all kinds. Therefore it gets from time to time entangled in cheap substitutes of what it has freed itself from, and it falls under the fetters of machine politicians, of prohibition crusaders, or of abolition preachers of all kinds. For a while — and then the instinctive wisdom manages to get rid of all these fetters one by one.

It is extremely difficult to fool the American people all the time; it is quite easy to induce them to try anything — as the immigrant does who grimly wants, with all his determination and resourcefulness, to start life anew. By becoming collective this fondness for experiment and trial has socialized and lessened its risks. The enormous pool of wisdom of plain men who, finding themselves alone on this continent, managed to get something done has perhaps more resources in itself than our rational thought can measure. It is also true that this healthy resourcefulness has sometimes a rare power of irritating and humiliating the rational thought of the native and of the imported intellectuals.

Perhaps the freedom and the equality exalted in the Declaration of Independence mean a shrewd willingness to give to every germ a chance, until the body becomes self-immunized. Perhaps freedom here has its foundation in this astutely gained good health. I don’t know whether the rights that the Declaration mentions are unalienable, but I know that they cannot be easily alienated as long as they are guaranteed by good health, common sense, and good humor. Who knows whether God gave these rights to men? But certainly they are the instinct of the human race.

‘It is a very strange thing to be an American,’ MacLeish wrote. Perhaps it is somewhat less strange to become one. Or at least in becoming one the man who has been estranged from his own country may have the feeling that he is not doing a strange thing, that he is not the prey of a freak of destiny. He follows a way that other men have trod. Of course he is coming late, and he has to pay his toll. But he finds a country where, out of the pooled experiences of plain uprooted men, something healthy and enduring has come forth — a new kind of country.

I have now to pass the last test. I am told to go with my witnesses into a bare courtroom. A thin elderly man in shirt sleeves, sitting on the bench, calls my name. At his side is the American flag. On the grayed walls are two cheap old pictures, one of Washington and the other of Lincoln. With a quick official voice the man on the bench says: ‘Do you believe in the American Constitution? Do you believe in the principles of the Declaration of Independence? Do you give up your allegiance to your former country? Are you willing to bear arms for the defense of the United States?’ . . . ‘We shall check all the information and data, and if they are correct after ninety days you will be called to take your final oath.’

I become an American citizen. So help me God.