EPISODES OF MILITARY NATURALIZATION
In one army division, at Fort Riley, Kansas, thirty nationalities were represented by the candidates for citizenship, including not only the pseudo-Austrians, but Rumania, Serbia, Bulgaria, Montenegro, Armenia, Syria, Guatemala, Honduras, the Azores, and most of the rest of the civilized world. At Fort Riley was made the record of “forty-three citizens in forty minutes.” At Camp Devens, Massachusetts, more than 2,000 men were admitted to citizenship and took the oath of allegiance in one operation, lined up on the parade-ground by nationalities. A New York State court naturalized soldiers of fifty-six racial varieties on the first day of the visiting court.
In a session of court held in a Tennessee encampment the court crier opened the ceremonies with his, “Oyez! Oyez!” and a procession of dignitaries, military and civil, marched in under the flags for the ceremonial—a solemn invocation, an address by a venerable judge, and the crash of “The Star-spangled Banner.” Then the general made a speech, in which he welcomed each of those who a little while before had been “strangers and foreigners,” and dubbed him “one of our men.”
“Fellow citizens, comrades!” he struck home with booming voice in his peroration, “we will lash ourselves together with hoops of steel, and go forth to avenge the outrages that have been committed. There is no power on earth that can keep us from our purpose!”
Some soldier started the song, “Keep the Home Fires Burning,” and the aliens of a little while before, many of them hardly knowing the English word, joined in, with lusty emphasis upon and new significance in the refrain,
“Till the boys come home!”
Down in Alabama, a government official at a similar session apostrophized Liberty in strident Polish, followed by a second lieutenant in similar vein, but in Italian; and even those of other tongues, including English, who could not understand the words, knew well enough or felt in their hearts the drift of it.
As has been said, some got across without naturalization, and one aftermath of that was an extraordinary scene in the Walter Reid Hospital at Washington. The opportunity returned to the wounded there, in dramatic guise. An orderly walked through the wards summoning all men who desired to become citizens to gather at once in the library, to be taken before the judge.
There was a scrambling from cots, men with missing limbs, lads with heavily bandaged faces, soldiers in every manner of hospital négligé. The thump of crutches was heard along the halls—more than a hundred answered the first call. When the officer in charge looked over the battered and motley assembly, saw the lame and helpless being assisted into motor vehicles for the journey to court, he gave an order designed to produce more formal dress for another occasion, but did not dampen the ardor of that going! And before the judge they held up their hands, or stumps of hands, and swore their fealty to the country to which already they had given better proof.
Out at Camp Zachary Taylor, near Louisville, Kentucky, is a great ash tree, now come to be known as “Naturalization Tree.” Its arms, in benediction, have been spread out over many hundreds of new citizens as they took the oath of allegiance and marched away upon their first American duty. That tree is for them a monument, a memorial of a Great Occasion.
In one of the Eastern camps three officers, helping the Naturalization Service in this business, looked up at one another in the spell of a common thought:
“Here we are, Major Schmidt, Captain Pulaski, and Lieutenant Martinelli”—such might have been their names; they were of races as various—“all of foreign birth, helping to make Americans!”
’Twas a pregnant thought, and it typified what was going on all over the country, in preparation for the “doing of great things together,” for the new nation’s acquisition of “a common glory in the past ... a will to do still greater things in the future.”
In the varied procession that passed on this errand before just one court came a Gentleman from Verona and a Merchant of Venice, as the judge himself styled them; a Filipino who had served two years in the Philippine constabulary; an Abyssinian count, born in Somaliland and claiming kinship to King Menelik and to speak twenty-seven languages. Then there was Dugga Ram, a Hindu, whom the judge made an exception to the rule against Asiatics; and the man from Russian Poland, who denied having any sovereign at all; the Armenian who said he would refuse citizenship if to get it he had to acknowledge himself a Turkish subject; the technically alien color sergeant who had served for years in the regular army and had been wounded in the Philippines.
An old soldier of the Civil War, still an alien in the eyes of the law, a Kentuckian seventy-six years old with a wife and six children, all born on this soil, and Americans beyond cavil, took advantage of the opportunity to file his tattered old army discharge of 1865 in lieu of “first papers.” There will be, till he dies, two Great Dates in that old fellow’s life—1861, when, like the aliens of this war, he pledged his life to maintain the United States, and 1918, when the United States formally accepted him into full recorded fealty and fellowship. Yet the Fact had been a human reality for nearly sixty years!
There were not a few officers who had been commissioned in oversight of the fact that their alienage legally should have barred them. The defect was swiftly removed. And there were English and Irish and Scotch and Welsh—and others, too—who had been here so many years and were so saturated with all that is essential of Americanism that their naturalization seemed a formality almost absurdly superfluous.
To all of these at various times and under diverse conditions—sometimes in glaring noonday inbreaks of dreary camp routine; sometimes at night in the last hours before the grim setting forth for France—great words were spoken to solemnize and signalize the transaction. Perhaps the best of all was that tense sentence of General Bell:
I beg of you not to take this oath of allegiance to the United States unless it is in your heart to do so.
Let it not be forgotten that nobody compelled these men to utilize this privilege. The law stipulated only that they “may petition.” Their alienage would have exempted them from service and the peril that awaited them.
At first, the certificates of naturalization were delivered; but later, as the flood of applicants became overwhelming and the complications involved hurried departure overseas, before the papers were ready, and other considerations, the delivery was delayed, and the men were advised to arrange to have their precious “last papers” sent rather to their homes, or even retained in Washington until after the war. This was a deep disappointment to the new citizens; and at Camp Upton, for one example, a judge, who knew men by heart, caused the drawing up of a mimeographed temporary certificate, properly embellished with “SS,” “Be it known,” and all the rest of the imposing verbiage, with the soldier’s name suitably prominent in mid-page.