A History of the United States

by Cecil Chesterton

Fortunately, however, the traditions of the country were democratic. Democracy is no preservative against incidental corruption; you will have that wherever politics are a profession. But it is a very real preservative against the secrecy in which, in oligarchical countries like our own, such scandals can generally be buried. The Erie scandal met Blaine on every side. One of the most damning features of the business was a very compromising letter of his own which ended with the fatal words: "Please burn this letter." As a result of its publication, crowds of Democratic voters paraded the streets of several great American cities chanting monotonously—

"Burn, burn, burn this letter!
James G. Blaine.
Please, please! Burn this letter!
James G. Blaine.
Oh! Do! Burn this letter!
James G. Blaine."

The result was the complete success of the clean government ticket, and the triumphant return of Grover Cleveland, the first Democrat to take the oath since the Civil War, and perhaps the strongest and best President since Lincoln.

Meanwhile, the Republic had found itself threatened with another racial problem, which became acute at about the time when excitement on both sides regarding the Negro was subsiding. Scarcely had the expansion of the United States touched the Pacific, when its territories encountered a wave of immigration from the thickly populated countries on the other side of that ocean. The population which now poured into California and Oregon was as alien in race and ideals as the Negro, and it was, perhaps, the more dangerous because, while the Negro, so far as he had not absorbed European culture, was a mere barbarian, these people had a very old and elaborate civilization of their own, a civilization picturesque and full of attraction when seen afar off, but exhibiting, at nearer view, many characteristics odious to the traditions, instincts and morals of Europe and white America. There was also the economic evil—really, of course, only an aspect of the conflict of types of civilization—arising from the fact that these immigrants, being used to a lower standard of life, undercut and cheapened the labour of the white man.

Various Acts were passed by Congress from time to time for the restriction and exclusion of Chinese and other Oriental immigrants, and the trouble, though not even yet completely disposed of, was got under a measure of control. Sumner lived long enough to oppose the earlier of these very sensible laws, and, needless to say, trotted out the Declaration of Independence, though in this case the application was even more absurd than in that of the Negro. The Negro, at any rate, was already resident in America, and had been brought there in the first instance without his own consent; and this fact, though it did not make him a citizen, did create a moral responsibility towards him on the part of the American Commonwealth. Towards the Chinaman it had no responsibility whatever. Doubtless he had, as a man, his natural rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"—in China. But whoever said anything so absurd as that it was one of the natural rights of man to live in America? It was, however, less to the increased absurdity of his argument than to the less favourable bias of his audience that Sumner owed his failure to change the course of legislation in this instance. An argument only one degree less absurd had done well enough as a reason for the enslavement and profanation of the South a year or two before. But there was no great party hoping to perpetuate its power by the aid of the Chinese, nor was there a defeated and unpopular section to be punished for its "treason" by being made over to Mongolian masters. Indeed, Congress, while rejecting Sumner's argument, made a concession to his monomania on the subject of Negroes, and a clause was inserted in the Act whereby no person "of African descent" should be excluded—with the curious result that to this day, while a yellow face is a bar to the prospective immigrant, a black face is, theoretically at any rate, actually a passport.

The exclusion of the Chinese does but mark the beginning of a very important change in the attitude of the Republic towards immigration. Up to this time, in spite of the apparent exception of the Know-Nothing movement, of which the motive seems to have been predominantly sectarian, it had been at once the interest and the pride of America to encourage immigration on the largest possible scale without troubling about its source or character: her interest because her undeveloped resources were immense and apparently inexhaustible, and what was mainly needed was human labour to exploit them; her pride, because she boasted, and with great justice, that her democratic creed was a force strong enough to turn any man who accepted citizenship, whatever his origin, into an American. But in connection with the general claim, which experience has, on the whole, justified, there are two important reservations. One is that such a conversion is only possible if the American idea—that is, the doctrine set forth by Jefferson—when once propounded awakens an adequate response from the man whom it is hoped to assimilate. This can generally be predicted of Europeans, since the idea is present in the root of their own civilization: it derives from Rome. But it can hardly be expected of peoples of a wholly alien tradition from which the Roman Law and the Gospel of Rousseau are alike remote. This consideration lies at the root of the exception of the Negro, the exception of the Mongol, and may one day produce the exception of the Jew.

The other reservation is this: that if the immigration of diverse peoples proceeds at too rapid a rate, it may be impossible for absorption to keep pace with it. Nay, absorption may be grievously hindered by it. This has been shown with great force and clearness by Mr. Zangwill under his excellent image of the "Melting Pot." Anyone even casually visiting New York, for instance, can see on every side the great masses of unmelted foreign material and their continual reinforcement from overseas, probably delaying continually the process of fusion—and New York is only typical in this of other great American cities.

A new tendency to limit immigration and to seek some test of its quality has been a marked feature of the last quarter of a century. The principle is almost certainly sound; the right to act on it, to anyone who accepts the doctrine of national self-government, unquestionable. Whether the test ultimately imposed by a recent Act passed by Congress over President Wilson's veto, that of literacy, is a wise one, is another question. Its tendency may well be to exclude great masses of the peasantry of the Old World, men admirably fitted to develop by their industry the resources of America, whose children at least could easily be taught to read and write the American language and would probably become excellent American citizens. On the other hand, it does not exclude the criminal, or at any rate the most dangerous type of criminal. It does not exclude the submerged population of great European cities, the exploitation of whose cheap labour is a menace to the American workman's standard of life. And it does not, generally speaking, exclude the Jew.

The problem of the Jew exists in America as elsewhere—perhaps more formidably than elsewhere. This, of course, is not because Jews, as such, are worse than other people: only idiots are Anti-Semites in that sense. It arises from the fact that America, more than any other nation, lives by its power of absorption, and the Jew has, ever since the Roman Empire, been found a singularly unabsorbable person. He has an intense nationalism of his own that transcends and indeed ignores frontiers, but to the nationalism of European peoples he is often consciously and almost always subconsciously hostile. In various ways he tends to act as a solvent of such nationalism. Cosmopolitan finance is one example of such a tendency. Another, more morally sympathetic but not much less dangerous to nationalism in such a country as America, is cosmopolitan revolutionary idealism. The Socialist and Anarchist movements of America, divided of course in philosophy, but much more akin in temper than in European countries, are almost wholly Jewish, both in origin and leadership. For this reason, since America's entrance into the Great War, these parties, in contrast to most of the European Socialist parties, have shown themselves violently anti-national and what we now call "Bolshevist."

But organized Socialism is, in America, almost a negligible force; not so organized labour. In no country has the Trade Union movement exercised more power, and in no country has it fought with bolder weapons. In the early struggles between the organized workers and the great capitalists, violence and even murder was freely resorted to on both sides, for if the word must be applied to the vengeance often wreaked by the Labour Unions on servants of the employer and on traitors to the organization, the same word must be used with a severer moral implication of the shooting down of workmen at the orders of men like Carnegie, not even by the authorized police force or militia of the State, but by privately hired assassinators such as the notorious Pinkerton used to supply.