He knows that a big army of immigrants armed with pick and shovel is down there in the subway cavity; and he knows that they build the roads over which he spins his motor. Still he does not really grasp the fact that the railroad that carries him, the clothes he wears, the cigars he smokes, the furniture he puts in his house are made by immigrant hands. Take iron and steel, the strategic industry, so to speak, in America to-day. The Federal Immigration Commission found that 57.7 per cent of the workmen in this industry were foreign born; and if you add the workmen of foreign-born parentage, the percentage mounts to 71.7. And so it goes through a long list of essential industries—in sugar refining, 85 per cent of the workmen are foreign born; in bituminous coal mining, 61.9 per cent; and so on. And there is no one to take his place. There are to-day three jobs for every two workmen, and we are calling out our reserve of women who have never before worked for wages. We often hear of the displaced American workmen, but when we look for them, we generally find they have moved up in the economic scale.
What other value are immigrants in American life? What percentage do they possess of the social opportunity and liberty of America? What percentage do they contribute to it? What percentage are they permitted to contribute to it?
Some immigrants come to us with racial powers, instincts, and susceptibilities, which, however modified by years of peasant toil, have great potential value for America. Some come to us with vision trained for centuries in beauty of line and color, with the skilled hands of races that have been shaping arch or temple or cathedral for thousands of years. They feel beauty and mobility of outline as only those feel them who have lived with them for generations. What becomes of these capacities over here? Does America give immigrants the chance to use them? Does America even know they exist?
Another illusion is that the present races coming to America are not easily assimilated, and should they be, they would give America an undesirable type.
What, after all, is Americanism? What is the destiny of America? What do we want it to be? What, in the great evolution of nations, is it bound to be? Until the average American meets and answers these questions squarely, we cannot settle the question of what races are best for the future of America. Miss Repplier quotes Dr. Horace Kallen as saying, “Only men who are alike in origin and spirit and not abstractly can be truly equal, and maintain that inward unanimity of action and outlook which makes a national life.” And, says Miss Repplier, rightly, “We have no mutual understanding, no common denominator.”
We have not. The first Americans whose opportunity, yes, and whose responsibility it was to produce these, have failed ignominiously to do so. “An Englishman,” says Miss Repplier, “knows that a Russian Jew cannot in five years or in twenty-five years become English; that his standards and ideals are not convertible into English standards and ideals. A Frenchman does not see in a Bulgarian or a Czech the making of another Frenchman.”
True, but what is an American? Is he an Anglo-Saxon racial type, and if so, by what law? Do we desire him to be this?
I do not despise the conclusion of ethnologists, but they seem to have so few conclusions and so many theories. And the root of them seems to be, not experience, but apprehension. Meanwhile, I see all around me valiant Americans, Southern European by birth and tradition, Americans now in spirit and loyalty and tendency. These men and women have mastered the opportunity—for they had to seek and improve it themselves—to become assimilated. In spite of the thousands of their countrymen among us, still un-American, I am convinced of two things: That America can control its own destiny, that one of the greatest obstacles has been slothful neglect, another obstacle, nativism; and that the way to attain control of our destiny is by aggressive, not passive, Americanism. When this is under way, it will be easy enough to sort out and deal separately and finally with undesirable races and types or those that have no desire to become Americans.
In the midst of all our discussion of to-day about a prepared America, there is no national policy emerging. We see Congress half-heartedly bolstering up the army and navy. We see the Federal Bureau of Immigration without adequate authority at work upon a Federal system of employment exchanges, a system which can be overturned by successors in office. We see the Bureau of Naturalization at work on a citizenship program into which it jumps without preparation, preëmpting a field long occupied by its neighbor in the Interior Department, the Bureau of Education, without a suggestion of real coöperation. We see the Bureau of Education with an unlimited field before it, hampered by state lines and no funds. We have laws demanding that an alien shall learn English and have a knowledge of the Constitution in order to become a citizen, yet leaving it to the ward boss to supply the information. We see the various departments dealing with various phases of preparedness pursuing a path of departmental routine, waste, and duplication. No clear uniform note runs through it all. There is little apparent indication that times have changed and new issues and opportunities are presented to our American government. We see the field of transportation and distribution cut into small sections by local regulations and local competition. One state is pitted against another to secure labor for the development of the individual state—with no thought of national needs.
Surely we cannot, in all fairness, expect the immigrant to distribute himself wisely, to protect himself adequately, to educate himself intelligently, to become a willing citizen without the full coöperation of the native American. Yet upon this whole matter we have no national sense of responsibility, no national consciousness. If a practical bill providing for a national Americanization policy, to be administered by national authority but leaving to states and counties and cities their due rights and obligations, were at this moment before Congress, it would have small chance of being considered. The trouble is that we have no convinced body of native Americans behind it to support it.