POLITICS A GREAT AMERICANIZING FORCE
Politics, local politics—the ordinary interest of the ordinary citizen; the day’s work and the day’s life, are great Americanizing forces, and they are working every minute. The immigrant generally, especially he of the so-called “new immigration,” comes here without much if any experience in public affairs. All the life of all the generations from which he comes has been passed without real participation; government in the old country went on over his head, in a rarefied stratum which he never entered and of which he knew little. That is one reason why, on the average, it takes more than ten years for him to come to the point of asking for citizenship.
Of late some of the very people who declared that the immigrant comes here with only “sordid motives” have favored pressure upon him to become a citizen by means of refusing him employment unless he does become one. The great increase in declarations of intention during the past three or four years has been due almost entirely to the restrictions adopted formally or informally all over the country confining employment, even in privately owned industries, to those who have at least taken out “first papers.” Even in the Bureau of Naturalization there was for a time more than a tendency to pursue this policy of forcing citizenship upon aliens. It was abandoned because no government can kidnap the subjects or citizens of another without getting into difficulty. There is still a good deal of confusion of thought about this matter.
The importance of it lies in the fact—obvious to any right thought about it—that we want for our new citizens only those who come of their own accord and free will. We want, moreover, only those who are right-minded. The effort to stamp out the use of every mother tongue but one, to obliterate all affection for the old home in Scandinavia, Bavaria, Dalmatia, Bohemia, not only is futile; we do not want for our fellow citizens the kind of people who can turn their back without a qualm upon the memories of childhood.
Breathes there the man with soul so dead
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart hath ne’er within him burned
As home his footsteps he hath turned
From wandering on a foreign strand?
What sort of an American could be made out of one able in any circumstances—worst of all under repressive compulsion—to turn his back upon the tongue, the traditions, and the associations of his fathers? We are not such ourselves, and in our sane minds we do not want those who join us to be such. The process of real assimilation is a process slow in its nature, reaching not forms and words, but sentiments of the highest and most subtle kind.
You cannot beat love of country into any worthwhile person with a club—or with a law.
[III]
CITIZENSHIP: UNDER THIS FLAG, AND OTHERS
There is, indeed, such a thing as a “man without a country,” and it is only a few years since the United States, even if inadvertently, legislated so that there may easily be now a woman without one. But the laws of nations make no provisions for the existence voluntarily of anyone who may regard himself as “a citizen of the world.” With the vanishment of terra incognita in the final achievement of human exploration at the two poles of the earth, virtually every foot of the surface of the globe has come, at least constructively, under the dominion of some government. And with it every man, woman, and child on earth has acquired or had thrust upon him a legal nationality of some sort, from which, generally speaking, he can escape only by choosing or having thrust upon him another—however feeble or tenuous its grasp, however slight or contemptuous his perception and recognition of it.
The Great War emphatically registered this fact, with its ruthless inclusion of friend, neutral, and foe within some category of practicable citizenship. In the United States the Selective Service Act, and other legislation as well—to say nothing of the extra-legal practices indulged in under cover of the popular state of mind—permitted no human being to regard himself as immune to effective classification under some sovereignty. The “conscientious objector,” the “philosophical anarchist,” and every sort of philosopher, however much he previously may have imagined himself free to abjure allegiance to government, found that his property, his food, his sons, his own very personal flesh-and-blood, were, after all, not his own, but were subject to conscription by the state. However much his spirit might be of fellowship with the saints of his cult or religion, in all material respects he must render unto Cæsar the things that Cæsar said were Cæsar’s.
From the most primitive times this has been so, even if in the America of the happy-go-lucky times of peace it has been lightly regarded or scarcely realized at all. The “gang spirit,” under the sway of which men always have held loyalty to the local clan to be one of the chief of obligatory virtues, is of the essence and fabric of group life, and is the tap-root of patriotism. It embodies an allegiance both to blood and to locality. Through the warp of all political history are woven two kindred threads representing these two allegiances; sometimes one, sometimes the other—in later development something of both. The lawyers speak of them as the Jus Sanguinis, the Law of the Blood, and the Jus Solis, the Law of the Soil, and distinguish between them; but both represent the claim of the community upon the loyalty and, if need be, the sacrifice and bodily service of the individual.
A classic illustration of the deeply embedded feeling that man cannot separate himself from the virtues, the sins, and the limitations of his clan, his country, is the tragedy in the valley of Achor, related in the Old Testament Book of Joshua,[14] wherein it was held that the sin of Achan the son of Zerah was ipso facto the sin of all Israel. And for the offense of one man,
... Joshua, and all Israel with him, took Achan the son of Zerah, and the silver, and the garment, and the wedge of gold, and his sons, and his daughters, and his oxen, and his asses, and his sheep, and his tent, and all that he had; ... and all Israel stoned him with stones, and burned them with fire, after they had stoned them with stones.[15]
This, with a vengeance, was a dramatization of the Jus Sanguinis, the Law of the Blood, by virtue of which an individual acquires nationality and civic responsibility through the blood of his ancestry, regardless of the place of his birth!