INDUSTRIALISM AND THE IMMIGRANT
We talk much about the American home, which is even yet the basis of national well-being, although many of its functions are abrogated. The home still determines the good or ill of the child, and through him the good or ill of the nation. Yet we permit millions of people to work, with no chance to make a real home.
Children there will be, Nature sees to that; but what kind of children can be begotten in our slums?
The slums in America are as much a national disgrace as they are a national menace. The gunmen of New York were bred in hovels which even the home-making genius of the Jewish people could not turn into homes, or make fit for the training of children to decent living.
You who go slumming to see the sights, and turn up your sensitive noses at the bad smells, and your eyes to heaven, thanking God that you “are not as other men,” must not forget that the vast majority of our foreign-born workers are compelled to live as they do by economic and social forces, which they cannot control.
You remain ignorant of the brave struggles for the home, and the heroic stand for virtue behind those sooty walls. You know nothing of the fear of God, the desire to obey His law, and the love of their country, which filters in to those receptive souls.
The growth and power of the I. W. W., a revolutionary organization of the most radical type, anti-national, anti-religious, repudiating God and State with horrifying blasphemy, were made possible by the fact that our industrial leaders, our so-called “hard-headed business men,” have the hard spot in their hearts and a very soft spot in their heads.
Of all the blind men I have met, the blindest are those farsighted ones who see wealth in everything, and every common bush aflame with gold, and see nothing else. Blind they are to their own larger good, blind to the nation’s needs, blind to the signs of the times. The social weal of our country is in the hands of the most unsocial....
As I analyze my own relation to the nation of which I am as much a part as if I had been born under its flag, I find that it rests itself upon the feeling of gratitude. Not for the bread I eat, for I had bread enough in my native country; not for the comfort of home, for I had fair comforts before I came; not even for liberty and democracy as abstractions, or even as embodied in the State; for I have found that freedom is within, and democracy a matter of attitude towards one’s fellows.
I am grateful for the chance I have had here to develop unhampered my own self, for a certain largeness of vision which I think I would not have developed anywhere else; for the richness which a broad, unhindered contact with all sorts and conditions of men has brought into my life.
There is something more than gratitude in my heart now. There is a larger sense of the values I received which I have not yet appropriated. There is in my heart a sublime passion for America. Would it have grown into the burning flame it is, if I had always worked in New York’s sweat-shops?
If I had been beaten by New York’s police? If I had reared my family in a tenement, and had to send my children to work when they should have played and studied?
If I had known America only through her yellow journalism, and sensed her spirit only in ward elections? I do not know.
What has kept me from becoming an Anarchist, from being jailed or hanged for leading mobs against their despoilers, God alone knows. His guidance is as unquestioned as it is mysterious. There were disclosed to me, early in my career, in some strange way, the spiritual values latent here. In spite of the gross, granite-like materialism at the top, I discovered the richness of the heritage left by the fathers of this Republic; in spite of the poverty and hardship in which I had to share, I saw here the fine quality of its vision; in spite of the crudeness of its blundering ways, all the love a man may have for a country grew in my heart, and changed only in growing stronger. Yet I am not in the mood to call to account those toilers whose patriotism is less fervent than mine and whose ideals are still held in check by the “stomach line.”
Editors and preachers, teachers and capitalists, with all the loud if not mighty host of us who are yammering about the want of patriotism among the masses, and the weakness of our national spirit; we are the first who must move a notch higher in our love of country and above the “stomach line.” We must make real the spiritual ideals for which this country stands, or at least try to realize them, before we can teach the alien and his children, or even our own, the meaning of liberty and democracy. Before we can ask them to die for our country we shall have to learn to live for it, and the definite task we have before us is not the mere idolatry of our flag, or the making of shard and shell.
To provide an adequate wage for our men, to so arrange our industrial order that there shall not be feverish activity to-day, and idleness, poverty, bread lines and soup kitchens to-morrow. To make working conditions tolerable, to provide against accidents and sickness, unemployment and old age, and to be true to the life about us.
These are national factors, essential to the making of an effective national state in our industrial age. Capital, in common with labor, must learn how to lend itself to the national purpose; for we have come upon a time, or the time has come upon us, when we must learn how to melt all classes, all sections and all races into a final unit. This is the time to touch the hearts and gain the confidence of all the people by a high regard for all, so that together we may turn our faces towards our ultimate goal....
The Commonwealth Steel Company of Granite City, Illinois, one of those remarkable corporations with a soul, whose business is rooted in the ideal of service, found its foreign laborers quartered in what was called “Hungry Hollow.” This company so exemplified the American spirit of fair play that, when the foreign employees were aroused to proper civic pride, they rebaptized “Hungry Hollow” into “Lincoln Place,” because Lincoln’s spirit was manifested towards them.
The Lincoln Progressive Club, as they named their organization, has as its immediate aim the study of the English language, and Americanization.
I wish there might be erected in every industrial center a statue of Abraham Lincoln for masters and men to see and reverence, thus being reminded of their duty towards each other and towards their common country.
What a people we could become if the immortal words he spoke were graven upon the pedestal of such a statue, “With malice towards none, with charity towards all,” ... to greet our eyes daily, and to challenge our conduct.
The history of the United States since the Civil War has not yet been written, for it is the story of an epoch just closing. It marks the sudden leaping of a people into wealth, if not into power; the fabulous growth of cities, the end of the pioneer stage, the beginning of an industrial period, and the pressure of economic and social problems towards their solution.
At least twenty millions of people have come full grown into our national life from the steerage, the womb out of which so many of us were born into this newer life. Most of us came to build and not to destroy; we came as helpers and not exploiters; we brought virtues and vices, much good and ill, and that, not because we belonged to this or the other national or racial group, but because we were human.
It is as easy to prove that our coming meant the ill of the nation as that it meant its well-being. To appraise this fully is much too early; it is a task which must be left to our children’s children, who will be as far removed from to-day’s scant sympathies as from its overwhelming prejudices.
The great war has swung us into the current of world events, and it ought to bring us a larger vision of the forces and processes which shape the nations and make their peoples. As yet we are thinking hysterically rather than historically, and the indications are that we may not learn anything, nor yet unlearn, of which we have perhaps the greater need.
Thus far we have become narrower rather than broader, for the feeling towards our alien population is growing daily less generous, and our treatment of it less wise.
Nor am I sure in what wisdom consists; the situation is complex; for we are the Balkan with its national, racial and religious contentions. We are Russia with its Ghetto, its Polish and Finnish problem. We are Austria and Hungary with their linguistic and dynastic difficulties. We are Africa and Asia; we are Jew and Gentile; we are Protestant and Greek, and Roman Catholic. We are everything out of which to shape the one thing, the one nation, the one people.
Yet I am sure that we cannot teach these strangers the history of their adopted country, and make it their own, unless we teach them that our history is theirs as well as ours, and that their traditions are ours, at least as far as they touch humanity generally, and convey to all men the blessings which come from the struggle against oppression and superstition.
In their inherited, national prejudices, in their racial hates, in their tribal quarrels, we wish to have no share, except as we hope to help them forget the old world hates in the new world’s love.
None of us who have caught a vision of what America may mean to the world wish to perpetuate here any one phase of Europe’s civilization or any one national ideal.
Although our institutions are rooted in English history, though we speak England’s language and share her rich heritage of spiritual and cultural wealth, we do not desire to be again a part of England, or nourish here her ideals of an aristocratic society.
In spite of the fact that for nearly three hundred years a large part of our population has been German, and that our richest cultural values have come from Germany, in spite of her marvellous resources in science, commerce and government, we do not care to become German, and I am sure that Americans of German blood or birth would be the first to repudiate it, should Germany’s civilization threaten to fasten itself upon us.
We do not wish to be Russian, in spite of certain values inherent in the Slavic character, nor do we desire to be French.
We do crave to be an American people—and develop here an American civilization; but if we are true to the manifold genius of our varied peoples, we may develop here a civilization, richer and freer than any of these, based upon all of them, truly international and therefore American.
Historians tell us that the history of the United States illumines and illustrates the historic processes of all ages and all people.
To this they add the disconcerting prophecy that we are drifting towards the common goal, and that our doleful future can be readily foretold. We have had our hopeful morning, our swift and brilliant noon, and now the dark and gruesome end threatens us.
I will not believe this till I must.
I will not, dare not lose the hope that we can make this country to endure firmly, to weather the storm, or at least put off the senility of old age to the last inevitable moment.
When, however, the end comes, as perhaps it must, I pray that we may project our hopes and ideals upon the last page of our history, so that it may read thus: This was a state, the first to grow by the conquest of nature, and not of nations. Here was developed a commerce based upon service, and not upon selfishness; a religion centering in humanity and not in a church.
Here was maintained sovereignty without a sovereign, and here the people of all nations grew into one nation, held together by mutual regard, not by the force of law.
Here the State was maintained by the justice, confidence and loyalty of its people, and not by battleships and armaments. When it perished, it was because the people had lost faith in God and in each other.