NOT RACIAL, BUT CULTURAL
Leaving for the long future, then, the evolution of the hereditary type, is there so soon something “home grown,” some “integration of culture,” that is peculiarly our own? Every American knows in his heart that however subtle and elusive, however difficult of definition, there is something real that distinguishes “America.”
In the attempt to fix the boundaries for the new Poland, the Peace Conference sought in vain for some limits of language or of political unity on which to base their demarcation. It came down at last to a simple question:
“Do you want to be Poles?”
And the question was enough.
Who doubts the answer to the question: Do you want to be American? There is something more than love of home, something higher than the liking of a cat for the warm place under the familiar stove, that stirs the heart of every normal American when he sees the Stars and Stripes. The alien who declares it his intention to become a citizen of the United States may not be able to put it in words, but he means, and he knows that he means, something real and vital, recognizes a substantial distinction, when he says that he wants to be an American!
There must be, there is, there has been always, in the midst of the racial chaos which to-day constitutes perhaps our greatest social problem, something that may be called nationally even if not yet racially American; something indigenous on this soil as on no other. It belongs to us. Up to a time beginning a quarter of a century ago, when the so-called “new immigration” from Southeastern Europe and southern Russia set in in full flood, and now anew in the experiences of the World War, it was and has again become, a thing shared by all of our racial groups and elements—peculiarly American. It answers the test set forth by Professor Weatherly in the paper already quoted, of the completion of the nationalizing process: “... when the things of the spirit are held in common and cherished by all, even if some specific ethnic or linguistic differences survive.” Or, in the words which he attributes to Renan:
To have a common glory in the past, a common will in the present; to have done great things together, to desire to do still greater—these are the essential conditions for being a People.
Professor Weatherly repeatedly emphasizes the great point—that “it is not sufficient that peoples should merely have undergone similar experiences” in order to be knit into a nation; “they must have undergone them together.” Most of the great modern nations, as he says, have passed through the same processes of social change, “but in actual adjustment to such change each has had its own separate career.”
Twenty-five years ago it was true that the term “American” meant one who, of whatever racial descent, represented something very definite, of tradition, experience, and achievement—and of promise, too—“a common glory in the past, a common will in the present”; “great things done together, and a desire to do still greater”; unity determined not by external facts alone, but by sentiment.
Now, dimly as we yet realize it, it is true again. A baptism of blood and suffering, of sacrifice and self-denial, and of common experience in a vast world emergency, and out of it a vision of better understanding and a great work before us to be done, have gone far to restore that unity of appreciation of “great things done together” and of will to do still greater which was our common glory—and was getting lost. We had, we have now, a right to be both proud and jealous of the heritage left us by our fathers of many races, and now watered by the blood of our own generation, and to look with concern, if not with dismay, upon what might portend a swallowing up of this moral, this sentimental unity, in a great inundation of newcomers, who, however well intending as individuals, have not shared our tradition and experience, and who seem not to have been fitted by any experience of their own to assimilate either the tradition of our past or our aspiration for the future.