"We make them into Americans. They come in immigrants of all nationalities, but they rapidly turn into Americans and make one nation."
And the ambassador thought within himself and later said to me:
"But a nation is a people with a long experience, who have lived and suffered together. There is a bell in a great church, which if you lightly flick it with the fingernail, gives out one single tone which goes echoing through the Cathedral. If you stand at the far end, you can hear that tone. So it is with a nation. If it is struck, it responds as one man to its furthest border. At the stroke of crisis it answers with one tone."
No. We are not a nation. We are a bundle of nationalities, and some day we shall be a Commonwealth if we deal wisely with these nations who dwell among us.
We cannot "make" Americans. We can make "imitation Americans," as Alfred Zimmern calls them. The Jew, spiritually sensitive and intellectually acute, becomes an "amateur Gentile." The imaginative Calabrian, of rich social impulse, becomes a flashily dressed Padrone. The poetic, religious Irishman, whose instinct has been communal for many centuries, becomes a district leader. These individuals have come to us with rare and charming gifts, fruit of their nationality. Instead of frankly accepting them in their inheritance, we have applied a hasty conversion which denied their life of inherited impulses and desires. Instead of bringing out the good in them, we have Americanized them into commercial types.
Where does our future lie?
It lies in developing and making use of men like the great Jews, Abram Jacobi, Charles Proteus Steinmetz and Louis Brandeis, who are true to their own nature, and who respond to the American environment. These men are not amateur Gentiles. They are Jews and they are Americans. It lies in Italians like Dr. Stella, who love those elements in Italy which are liberal, and who further every effort in America to create free institutions. We need the help of every man of them to save our country from commercialism.
Recently I asked one of the most brilliant of living scholars, of German descent, to give me his views on the future in America. He wrote:
"What is America to do? I should answer: preach hyphenation. Make the common man realize that nationality is a spiritual force which has in essence as little to do with government as religion has. When government interferes with freedom of worship, religion comes into politics and stays there till its course is unimpeded. The same is true of nationality—in Ireland, in East Europe and elsewhere. But that is only an accident. To allow governments to exploit for political ends the huge inarticulate emotional driving force of either religion or nationality is to open the floodgates. Hence the wars of religion in the Seventeenth Century and the nationalist hatreds of the present war."
Alfred Zimmern says: