Straight America, a call to national service

by Frances Kellor

Now that we face the crisis and know the necessity, we look with amazement and alarm at what our preparation has been. We turn to our schools and ask them what they have been doing in the way of preparing the voter—what has he been taught about America and its government, institutions, and opportunities? How have these been related to his own local civic life? What sense of national service has he acquired in his town school? Alas—we find there is nothing held so cheap as the American vote, and the last form of preparedness is that for voting. Of the American boy we require that he shall be born here, and shall be 21 years of age. We assume that somehow the public school, which he is required to attend in some states only, will teach him the value of the vote and how to use it, and something of his duties and obligations to his country. We also assume that the boy’s parents will educate him along these lines. To the girl in most states we deny the vote for apparently no reasons other than precedent, prejudice, conjecture, or apprehension.

There is no ceremony, no pledge of allegiance, no occasion made patriotically memorable in the mind of the boy when he casts his first vote. No one makes him welcome as a citizen of the country. He registers in his home town in an automatic way, and if he thinks of voting in the future as an obnoxious duty that interferes with his business or week ends, it is surely not entirely his own fault.

In some schools there is an increasing attempt to bring his rather localized experience into relation to the broader questions of the day, and into the national political life, but the mass of boys depend upon the newspapers and such discussion as they stimulate or hear among their fellows. This is good so far as it goes, but it is too critical, too superficial, too opinionated, too provincial to serve the great national need of America in the crucial test of elections. Despite our many thousands of educational organizations it is very difficult to obtain an impartial and scientific statement on any political controversy. There are many briefs for one side or the other, but few impartial statements that are not special pleading.

The indifference and ignorance of the native-born voter are real impediments to Americanism. A vote is a practical thing requiring as much knowledge and experience in its use as any other responsible act of life. You cannot teach a man to handle a gun by a series of lectures on the ethics of warfare. Neither can you teach a man to handle a vote by the average treatise on civil government.

In our failure to find this training in the public school, we turn next to the political school, the club, the district organization. Here we find every mechanism possible for getting the vote and holding it, but practically none for training or instructing that vote. It is easy to find a dozen men to help a prospective voter to obtain his citizenship papers, but very difficult to find one man or an institution to educate him in Americanism and English, enabling him to qualify. It is easy to find men who condemn the sinking of the Lusitania and watchful waiting in Mexico, but hard to find a man who has a clear, practical idea of how he will register that protest in November. Thousands will vote for Mr. Roosevelt as their protest in case he is nominated. But suppose Mr. Roosevelt is not nominated. Have they thought of their next effective protest at the polls? Justice Hughes perhaps. But who knows where he stands on these questions? Those of us who have worked with him as governor of New York, and knew him, take no risks, but how about the average voter who has no such knowledge and must make up his own mind?

As shown in the preceding chapter the acquiring of citizenship by aliens does not have for its main object the vote. To him, it is connected more closely with a job, with getting on in America, with freedom from the tyranny of his own country and from military service, and with gain. The power of the vote is, generally speaking, an unknown quantity to him, until he has been here some time—often it represents something which he can sell, or which he has to have to keep his job—ideals set before him by some native American. It is a rather curious thing that the padrone system had its real origin in our political rather than in our industrial system. The padrone is a labor boss who furnishes men to industrial organizations, and in return for keeping up the supply of men, has the privilege of housing and feeding them—making his profit from the employment fees, housing, and supplies. The padrone, however, is usually a political leader, not in the camp or quarry or mine where the industry is located, but in the city, which is the source of the supply of men. It was generally understood that the padrone, in return for the contract to furnish men, would deliver the foreign-born vote in his district in favor of the candidate acceptable to the company with whom he had contracted. He saw to it that his countrymen were naturalized and how they voted. In this way the position of the padrone became impregnable.

If a community as a whole fails to use the immigrant as a political and citizenship asset, some other force in the community is fairly sure to awaken to his political usefulness. The only way in which a community can “control” its alien vote is by controlling preparation for citizenship. Most communities, far from controlling it, have not yet developed interest in it. The American community, without night schools, without interest, without responsibility for the Americanism of one third or one half of its residents, is the real parent of this “alien” vote.

The ignorance of the newly naturalized voter is different from that of the American. But like the indifference and ignorance of the American voter, the ignorance of the foreign voter is largely a social matter, and is subject to the same remedies. In other words, it is not merely instruction in English and Civics, the usual preparation for citizenship, that makes an immigrant a good voter or a bad one. A very great deal depends upon his social background, upon the understanding and point of view he has been able to develop as a result of his contacts with American institutions and American community life. To develop a social understanding large enough and deep enough to make a man grasp readily a national political issue in all its importance, and the subtler aspects of community issues and legislation, when they come up to the vote, is a tremendous task—not a task that even a very intelligent and educated immigrant can compass for himself. This, in a political sense, is the heart of our present difficulty with the naturalized voter. His social assimilation has not been sufficiently thorough to give him the background he needs at the polls or to enable him to find himself among the various political parties and sub-parties.

Now, the average voter is too thoroughly localized. In other words, his political status in America is very much like his social status. He becomes fixed in a neighborhood, a colony, a ward, and he never learns to think of himself nationally. Politically, the issues are presented to him in the impersonation of local figures and interests—Max Schroeder at the corner saloon, or Tim Connolly of the Labor Council. National issues are invariably translated in ward terms and the immigrant accepts them at this valuation. After this kind of political tradition has persisted for a few generations the result is a community or colony of hopelessly provincial voters, keenly alive to the immediate practical profit or loss involved in any political issue, almost oblivious of the fact that the greatest good to the greatest number is the thing for which the citizen of a Republic is to vote if he is to fulfill his republicanism.

The social education of Americans is difficult enough. We need to Americanize the American voter quite as much as the foreign. But with the immigrant the problem of social education as a prerequisite to political freedom and competence is a far more difficult thing. The truth is that nobody can coach him in American life. He needs to live it and must be allowed to do so, if we are to have competent voters. In proportion to the breadth of his human contacts, and to the number and variety of American institutions which he touches he will be informed upon those subjects and points of view that fit him for the actual exercise of the vote.