It means the Americanization of women. Now women automatically become citizens with their fathers and husbands, although in some states they vote. The best Americanization agency is the home. We can only reach foreign-born women in their homes, and we must go to them. They are now isolated, forgotten, ignored, and constitute the greatest single backward factor in the progress of citizenship among women.
It means, lastly, not America first and safety first, which are sectional and selfish banners under which no man can fight his best, but liberty, justice, honor, and right first.
This is no small task. The figures for 1910 tell us that America has about thirty-three million foreign-born people and persons of foreign-born parentage. One third have, therefore, in our immediate environment foreign traditions and standards. The problem is to keep the best of these and make them serve America. No nation in the civilized world would think itself “prepared” with such an internal situation, and yet we officially ignore it.
These intricate, delicate, interlocking questions, mostly unsolved in any national way, are found in education, savings and investments, standards of living, and in all of the other fields before us. They are as important and as difficult as those we are solving in military defenses and industrial mobilization. They are the problems of nationalism—the things that make the immigrant man a good citizen, workman, or soldier. They must be considered in any movement for a unified America. They have always been approached by our government from some sectional, local, or isolated point of view. They have never been approached from the national point of view. The 42 volumes of the Federal Immigration Commission are silent on a national policy other than the negative one of exclusion. They deal exhaustively with conditions in industry, in philanthropy, but nowhere do they lead us to a policy of a program for America that meets its present requirements.
We shall never attain this united America back of our firing line, in our shops, in our cities, in our schools, on our great arteries of communications and supply, by the most intelligent policy, by the wisest of laws, by the fairest enforcement of law, unless each and every American resident does his share—and realizes that a prepared America at every point comes back to him and to him alone.
We shall not accomplish preparedness through Americanization without organization. We have the beginnings of many excellent movements of Americanization, in much the same state as our army and navy. Each bureau interested in some phase of the subjects carries on its work, drafts bills, and enforces laws. We are as wholly lacking in policy, program, and leadership as in any other phase of preparedness. We do not yet recognize as a nation that Americanization is fundamental preparedness and should be vitally related to military and industrial preparedness and to universal service.
No policy of preparedness can be complete without a strong sense of international duty and a willingness to defend it as loyally as American institutions. We are emerging from the haze of what we should have done to preserve international law. We have before us some pertinent problems which will test this new-found honor.
We owe it to ourselves, in our new treaties and new relations arising after the war, to have a thorough understanding in regard to citizenship so the protection of the American flag will follow every citizen, native and foreign born, to every country in the world under whatever conditions.
We owe it to the people who come to our shores asking admission that all of the regulations of aliens should be in our national admission law and not hidden in state and local laws preventing their earning a living and becoming good citizens. This whole law should be based upon America’s welfare and capacity for making these men and women good citizens. We do not want them unless they are willing to join with us for defense of American liberty.
When we have a common policy which all America understands and believes; a program to which every American can give efficient and loyal service; and leaders that Americans can and will follow, then we shall be a prepared nation,—standing again as we stood one hundred and forty years ago: for justice and right and liberty.