Straight America, a call to national service

by Frances Kellor

Unable to make himself understood, and without competent and honest assistance from an interpreter, the alien is placed at an additional disadvantage in our courts. Ignorant of his rights, not understanding what his offense is, he is tried and convicted, and leaves the court wondering what he has done that justifies it in branding him as a law breaker. His respect for American law and for American justice does not outlive many experiences of this kind, and another door to Americanism is closed.

Our journals are also nativistic. We are known as a country ruled and governed by our newspapers, which are said to be able to make and unmake political parties, and to raise a politician or statesman to a dizzy pinnacle of fame or else to cast him headlong into oblivion. The average paper has page after page—on Saturdays and Sundays, section after section—full of articles that are suggestive and instructive to those who have their bearings already, but a helpless, hopeless maze to those who have come to America so recently that they still need an occasional signpost to guide them through our political mazes. It seems to be assumed that the readers know the form, the history, the value, and the significance of American institutions, and need only to have them attended to or referred to, the more casually the better. Some of our most significant journals take apparent pride in being cryptic. They ignore the presence in this country of millions who need to be informed, who ardently desire information, about our history and our institutions, and who do not know where they can obtain it from an English-speaking source.

About 9,000,000 people in this country read foreign-language newspapers. Some of them are persons who read these papers largely from necessity while they are learning English, and some of them never intend to learn, and never do learn, English at all. An immigrant who arrives in this country without being able to speak English finds that it takes a considerable time to learn it—the length of time depending on the place he finds work in and the people he works with. Now in this period, long or short, which must elapse before the alien learns English, the foreign-language newspaper could be an invaluable Americanizing agent. But it cannot be so without the coöperation of the native press and native Americans. And that we have never given. Our big manufacturers advertise in thousands of these papers to sell goods. Otherwise we do not concern ourselves with them at all, except to regard all with suspicion when we learn of the disloyalty of one. Many of the editors of these papers, themselves not Americanized in any complete sense, are making inadequate but persistent efforts to connect their people with American institutions to lead them to become Americans, real citizens of this republic. They get little help from us. The American press is increasingly proud of its position as one of the very greatest of our social institutions. It is run for labor, for capital, for society, for business, for the man in the street; but it is run very little for the foreign-born citizen or alien who against odds is trying to accomplish his own assimilation. Yet this is exactly the task in which the newspaper that considered his interests and his needs could help him most.

The public library, especially in cities where public school branches are maintained, has a great opportunity to reach the adult immigrant in his own neighborhood, in community reading rooms, by providing newspapers, books in the native language, simple books about America, either in English or translated into the native tongue. Whenever public library facilities are extended to immigrants, there is ample testimony to the enthusiasm with which they are received. A few years ago the management of the New York City public library in a very interesting report gave some startling figures covering the patronage of the public libraries by the foreign born of New York City, showing that they were exceptionally eager and persistent readers, and of the more serious forms of literature—history, philosophy, science, and drama. In hundreds of industrial towns of the country the public library is a virtual mausoleum, a monument to culture, little used but “always there.” Whole sections of the town that have never found the way to the library, and who might not be made welcome if they did, are starving for some recreative interest, some sources of information which they could manage.

But here occurs a stumblingblock. The native American has a prejudice against furnishing books in a foreign language and often proceeds on the theory that although he does nothing to furnish facilities for learning English, it is better that the immigrant should read nothing while he waits.

It is idle to fear that the foreign-language book is an obstacle to Americanization. Anything that increases the alien’s intelligence, and especially his information about America, is an aid, not a hindrance. Outside of the large cities few libraries have any collection of foreign books. Those that do are likely to have an entirely academic or classical assortment. A few weeks ago, in investigating the public library facilities of one of our big steel towns, now given over to the production of munitions, it was discovered that the foreign language “collection” adapted to the races in the town consisted of one Polish book. In one industrial town which is heavily immigrant a public library a few weeks ago opened a branch in a foreign bank—and, as might be expected, it is flourishing.

One of the chief American grievances against the immigrant is that he does not spend or invest his money here. Until the establishment of the postal savings banks he had little encouragement to do so. Here again we cling stubbornly to our nativism, and maintain that arrangements that are satisfactory to the native born are good enough for the foreign born as well. Few banks have foreign departments, although of late the number is increasing. The ordinary bank is not adapted to the immigrant. He is intimidated by it and is not always welcome. That 59 per cent of the present investors in the Postal Savings Banks are foreign born, and that this 59 per cent owns 72 per cent of all the money now on deposit is significant proof that the immigrant will use our banks as an institution.

If I have given the impression that the entire responsibility for Americanism is the native American’s, I have failed in my purpose. I have but attempted to restore the balance and point out the really controlling factor in Americanism.

If I have failed to note the many very important and excellent movements now under way in the name of reform and paid by benevolence, it is not that I underestimate their value. It is because I want the native American to realize that reform and philanthropy are no more now to be the custodians of Americanism than when the Declaration of Independence was signed. It is the average business man in his plant and the average official in his government office that must preserve it in every thought, act, and ambition of the day’s routine work—carrying always the overhead charge of patriotism and nationalism.

This fixing of initial responsibility does not mean that the immigrant has no responsibility. Far from it. He must be ready to stay in America, to become a citizen, to adopt American standards, to obey our laws, to meet his obligations, to do his duty, to assume his responsibilities for, as well as to exercise, his rights. But he must know what these are. He must realize that the native American knows what they are and will set him a good example. He must be told that he is expected to meet the requirements or America does not want him and will not keep him. Our admission and exclusion laws serve no such notice on him. The literacy test is a plain evasion of the native American’s responsibility and a lazy way of thinking out the problem. We native Americans in business or in office have never addressed ourselves seriously to the task of making Americans or nationalizing America. When we do, we shall have as strong a nation as we have bridges and railways and banks.