“Chicago has a larger German population than any city in the world, excepting Berlin and Vienna; and the German-, Austrian-, and Hungarian-Americans should, at this coming election, set aside every other consideration, and vote as a unit for Robert M. Sweitzer. Stand shoulder to shoulder in this election, as our countrymen in the trenches and on the high seas are fighting for the preservation of our dear Fatherland. The election of a German-American would be a fitting answer to the defamers of the Fatherland, would cause a tremendous moral effect throughout the United States, and would reëcho in Germany, Austria, and Hungary.”
The “moral effect” of this appeal was not precisely what its authors had anticipated. Men asked themselves in bewilderment and wrath what the dear Fatherland, any more than dear Dahomey or the beloved Congo, had to do with the Chicago elections? They have been putting similar questions ever since.
Some months later, the German-American Central Society of Passaic, uniting itself with the German-American National Alliance, called for assistance in these glowing words:—
“Come all of you German societies, German men, and German women, so that united offensively and defensively [zum Schutz und Trutz verein] with weapons of the spirit, we may help our beloved Germany onward.”
“Weapons of the spirit!” If this means prayer and supplication, the matter lies between the petitioner and his God. If it means exhortations, pamphlets, and platform oratory, the champion of Germany stands well within his rights. But the next paragraph drops all figures of speech, and states the real issue with abrupt and startling distinctness:—
“We ask for your speedy decision with respect to your acquiescence, in order to permit of an effective participation and lead in the spring campaign of 1915.”
In plain words, the spiritual weapon with which the German-American proposes to fight the battle of Germany is the American ballot. When the franchise was granted to him, or to his father, or to his grandfather (whichever did this country the honour of first accepting citizenship), a solemn oath was sworn. Allegiance to a foreign government was forever disowned; fealty to the government of the United States was vowed. He who uses his vote to further the interests of a European state is a perjured man, and that he should dare to threaten us with the power of his perjury is the height of arrogant ill-doing. That such a question as “What is the proportion of votes which the Germans of your section control?” should be asked by German agents, and answered by German newspapers, affronts our nation’s honour, soils a sacred trust by ill-usage, and tears our neutrality to rags.
When the Lusitania was sunk, and the horror of the deed shamed all Christendom, save only those strange residents of Berlin who received the news with “enthusiasm,” and “joyful pride,” the first word tactfully whispered in our ear was that, while we might regret the drowning of Americans, we were impotent to resent it. And this impotence was to be a concession to the foreign vote. God only knows of what material Germany thought we were made,—putty, or gutta-percha, or sun-baked mud? Certainly not of flesh and blood. Certainly not with hearts to bleed, or souls to burn. Every comment vouchsafed by the German press placed us in the catalogue of worms warranted not to turn.
The contempt which the German “is not always nice in concealing” shines with a chastened lustre in the words and deeds of other foreign-born citizens. They accept the vote which we enthusiastically press upon them, regarding it as an asset, sometimes of marketable value, sometimes serving a stronger and more enduring purpose, always as an esteemed protection against the military service exacted by their own governments. They do not come to us “with gifts in their hands,”—to quote Mr. Lowell. They are for the most part destitute, not only of money, but of knowledge, of useful attainments, of any serviceable mental equipment. Mr. Edward Alsworth Ross, who is not without experience, confesses ruefully that the immigrant seldom brings in his intellectual baggage anything of use to us; and that the admission into our electorate of “backward men”—men whose mental, moral, and physical standards are lower than our own—must inevitably retard our social progress, and thrust us behind the more uniformly civilized nations of the world.
Meditating on these disagreeable facts, we find ourselves confronted by sentimentalists who say that if we would only be kind and brotherly, the sloping foreheads would grow high, the narrow shoulders broad, the Pole would become peaceable, the Greek honest, the Slav clean, the Sicilian would give up murder as a pastime, the Jew would lose his “monstrous love of gain.” Enthusiastic promoters of the “National Americanization Committee”—a crusade full of promise for the future—have talked to us so much and so sternly about our duty to the immigrant, our neglect of the immigrant, our debt to the immigrant, our need of the immigrant, that we have been no less humiliated than bewildered by their eloquence. Mr. Roosevelt alone, of all their orators, has had the hardihood to say bluntly that citizenship implies service as well as protection; that the debt contracted by the citizen to the state is as binding as that contracted by the state to the citizen; that a voter who cannot speak English is an absurdity no less than a peril; and that all who seek the franchise should be compelled to accept without demur our laws, our language, our national policy, our requisitions civil and military. This is what naturalization implies.