A GREAT COMPOSITE RECORD OF LOYALTY
Mr. Raymond F. Crist, then Director of Citizenship in the Bureau of Naturalization, pays a well-deserved tribute to the loyalty and the sacrifices of the foreign born, and points to the enhanced responsibility laid upon us by the service these men gave. In his report to the Commissioner of Naturalization,[148] “Concerning Americanization Activities,” Mr. Crist says, in part:
The names upon the roll of honor of the nation that were cabled back by the American Expeditionary Forces in France give emphatic testimony to the loyalty of the foreign born. The names on the rolls represent all European nationalities. So strongly in evidence were these names that they might well have been the rosters of the dead and wounded of any or all the European countries. The percentage of distinctly non-Anglo-Saxon names was exceedingly high. These lists still give mute testimony to the fact that the immigrant and the immigrant’s sons have laid down their lives for the land of their adoption. When the final records are computed they will undoubtedly show the presence in the military forces of our nation of the full quota of those of foreign birth. Their presence in our military and naval forces has worked a transformation with them. It has created an after-war debt and obligation upon the United States. The alien-born soldier has returned to America an educated and transformed individual. He is an American in all the senses.
Without intention to cavil or quibble about what Mr. Crist says—for what he says is essentially true—it is needful to remember that neither the stress of emotion under which these mass ceremonies at the camps were conducted, nor the act and fact of naturalization itself, nor yet, in any substantial way, the experiences in the army, could make new creatures of these men. They were afterward—they are now, especially in the chill reaction from the exuberance of that excited period—what they were before—“just folks”—good, bad, and indifferent, like the rest of us.
But there is this difference in what it means to them: They were welcomed into citizenship without the heart-breaking, gnat-straining suspicion through which, in normal times, they would have had to go if they went at all. And no politician urged or herded them into voting status and power at any stage of it. For their American citizenship and share in the common sovereignty they are under obligation to nobody. They bought what they got, as it were, with their own blood.
What intellectual preparation or textbook schooling, what weary treading of red-tape labyrinth, what minute inspection by government functionary in zealous search for undotted or uncrossed letters in a seven-year-old document, would better test or attest an alien’s capacity for citizenship, or make his induction safer for Democracy?
Anyway, these men—those not dead on foreign fields as their first, and last, service to the flag—have gone back to their communities with a new status, and, we may hope, with a new sense of their relation to and responsibility for the nation’s welfare. It remains to be seen what use they and the rest of us will make of these new things.
[X]
THE FOREIGN-BORN WOMAN, HER HOME AND HER CHILDREN, IN AMERICAN POLITICS
The foreign-born woman plays directly in American politics a part somewhat, but not much, more important than that played by snakes in the zoölogy of Ireland. There are several reasons for this besides the fact that hitherto she has shared the legal disabilities common to her sex in the American political scheme—which fact, by itself, has now been largely mitigated by the final ratification of the Nineteenth (Woman Suffrage) Amendment to the Constitution of the United States; though even that applies only to the ballot, and has not removed either the legal or the general traditional limitations and inequities under which women, in most parts of the country, still abide. So far as the ballot is concerned, the American woman, native or naturalized, is now acknowledged to be an individual person.
But the foreign-born woman, if married, is subject to a substantial limitation. She has citizenship only if her husband has it; she derives it, not by virtue of any act or wish or character of her own, but by strict inference from that of her husband. However much she may desire to become an American citizen, she cannot do so unless her husband chooses to become one; however desirable in her own right or fitness, the unfitness of her husband, or his rejection for any other reason, ipso facto excludes her. And, per contra, however much she might desire to remain a subject or citizen of the country of her birth or former residence, the naturalization of her husband, with or without her consent, even with or without her knowledge, ipso facto inflicts American citizenship upon her. True, this is technically subject to the provision of the law requiring that she must herself be eligible for citizenship; but, as has been stated elsewhere in this volume,[149] there is disagreement among the authorities as to whether this proviso was intended by Congress to apply only to women of those Oriental races, which are ineligible per se, or is applicable generally to the individual woman; also, there has been some attempt to hold that the wife is not naturalized by the naturalization of her husband if she continues to reside in the old country. Some judges will not naturalize a man if his wife remains abroad. Generally speaking, however, the construction is that the wife, whoever and wherever she may be, comes into American citizenship willy-nilly with the acceptance of her husband.
More than that, a woman born and residing in another country becomes an American citizen by her marriage with one; the clergyman, or other official, who pronounces them man and wife attests also an automatic and instantaneous change of jurisdiction and allegiance. It works equally the other way about—an American woman, marrying an alien in this country, in the house in which she was born and has lived for twenty years, forthwith, and regardless of any wish of hers in the matter, becomes instanter in the eyes of American law—and generally of international law as well—a citizen or subject of the sovereignty to which her alien husband owes allegiance. It is conceivable, as is elsewhere remarked, that her act in marrying an alien might deprive her of any citizenship at all, since no country can actually confer upon any person citizenship in another. This, however, is academic, since practically everywhere it is fundamental in the law that a married woman’s citizenship goes with that of her husband.