Superior energy! Thrift! Efficiency! Let dead lips at the peace table spell out those words. We remember the Alamo. We remember the Maine. Shall we forget the Lusitania?
That statesmanship is not acceptable American statesmanship which plans mercy for such a people, or which tolerates the thought of unsafely letting in more of that breed within our country’s gates. It is a false and weak statesmanship to mince matters in days like these. Had Germany’s war been fought out honestly by soldiers in uniform only, against soldiers in uniform, in accordance with the customs among warriors, then that war might one day be forgotten. But Belgium and France, plus von Bernstorff and von Papen and Scheele—No, no, and again, No! We Americans can not forget.
The propaganda campaign is beginning again here, now, in America, even in the existing confusion of our industries, in the hurrying of our own plans for demobilization. We shall soon hear stories intended to make us believe that France robbed us commercially, that Britain does not love us and only used us. Can you not hear now the German song: “The war is over now. We are at peace. Let us forget. Kamerad!”
But we are not at peace. Our dead stand at the table with all those other gallant dead, to demand their hearing through all time. We must be done with foresworn citizenship in America. We could forgive a soldier; but we cannot forgive a naturalized German who foreswore himself when he took the oath of allegiance to our country. That treachery is one thing which must go—that is one thing which shall never be forgotten or forgiven in America. Such men as these lost their war. There is no injustice, no unfairness in any of these words, which sound so harsh. They set lightly on the innocent, heavily on those who have guilt in their hearts.
It is for every man of foreign blood to know his own heart—we cannot know his heart for him. He alone knows whether he is German or American. He knows which he wants to be. We know that he cannot be both. That is the one test—the impossibility of a man being both a good German and a good American. Let him choose. Let him read his own heart. And let him remember that he is not the victor but the vanquished in this war.
One great American—I fancy even his enemies will allow him that title now—wrote as his final message to America the real answer to this war as it applies to us in America. Colonel Roosevelt’s last plea was for Americanism. It was read at an All-American Benefit Concert by a trustee of the society, because of the Colonel’s indisposition:
I cannot be with you, and so all I can do is wish you Godspeed. There must be no sagging back in the fight for Americanism merely because the war is over. There are plenty of persons who have already made the assertion that they believe the American people have a short memory, and that they intend to revive all the foreign associations which most directly interfere with the complete Americanization of our people.
Our principle in this matter should be absolutely simple. In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant, who comes here in good faith, becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace or origin.
But this is predicated upon the man’s becoming in fact an American and nothing but an American. If he tries to keep segregated with men of his own origin, and separated from the rest of America, then he isn’t doing his part as an American.
There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn’t an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag, and this excludes the red flag, which symbolizes all wars against liberty and civilization, just as much as it excludes any flag of a nation to which we are hostile.