The New World was New
For nearly a hundred and fifty years the peoples of Europe wanted to come to America; they knew, from those who were already here, what the plight of the foreigner was in Pittsburgh or in Tontitown, on Buzzards Bay or Puget Sound. They knew that outlanders were sometimes mocked and often cheated; that work was hard in a new land; that those who came before had chosen the best farms and worked themselves into the best jobs; they knew that for a time life would be strange, and even its pleasures would be alien to them. They knew, in short, that America was not the New Eden; but they also knew that it was the New World, which was enough. We have no apologies to make to the immigrant; except for those incivilities which people often show to strangers. Our law showed them nothing but honor and equity. The errors we made were grave enough; but as a nation we never committed the sin of considering an immigrant as an alien first, and then as a man. The economic disadvantages he suffered were the common misfortunes of alien and native alike. We could have gained more from our immigrants if we and they were not in such haste to slough off the culture they brought us. But we can face Europe with a clear conscience.
What we have to say to Europe is not only that "we are all the descendants of immigrants"; we go forward and say that the hunkie, the wop, the bohunk, the big dumb Swede, the yid, the Polack, and all the later immigrants, created billions of our wealth, built our railroads and pipe lines and generators and motor cars and highways and telephone systems; and that we are getting our laws, our movies, our dentistry, our poems, our news stories, our truck gardening, and a thousand other necessities of life, from immigrants and from first generation descendants of immigrants; and that they are respected and rewarded, as richly as a child of the DAR or the FFV's would be in the same honored and needed professions; we have to give to Europeans statistical proof of their fellow-countrymen's value to us, and cite the high places they occupy, the high incomes they enjoy, the high honors we give them; all these things are true and have to be said, so that Europe knows why America understands her people, why we can, without smugness or arrogance, talk to all the people of Europe.
And when that is said, we have to say one thing, harder to say honorably and modestly and persuasively:
That all these great things were done because the Europeans who did them were free of Europe, because they had ceased to be Europeans and become Americans.
The Soil of Liberty
This is the true incitement to revolution. Not that nations need Americanize themselves; the image of Freedom has many aspects, and the customs in which freedom expresses itself in France need not be the same as those in Britain or Germany. But the base of freedom is unmistakable—we know freedom as we know pure air, by our instincts, not by formula or definition. And it was the freedom of America which made it possible for forty million men and women to flourish, so that often the Russian and the Irish, the Bulgar and the Sicilian, the Croatian and the Lett, expressed the genius of their country more completely in America than their contemporaries at home; because on the free soil of America, they were not alien, they were not in exile. One can ask what was contributed to medicine by any Japanese who remained at home, comparable to the work of Noguchi or Takamine in America; or whether any Spaniard has surpassed the clarity of a Santayana; any Czech the scrupulous research of a Hrdlicka; any Hungarian the brilliant, courageous journalism of a Pulitzer; any Serb the achievements of Michael Pupin. The lives of all peoples, all over the world, are incalculably enriched by men set free to work when they came to America, And, it seems, only to America. The warm hospitality of France to men of genius did not always work out; Americans and Russians and Spaniards and English flocked to Paris and became precious, or disgruntled; they felt expatriated; in America men from all over the world felt repatriated, it was here they became normal, and natural, and great.
Beyond this—which deals with great men and is flattering to national pride—we have to say to the men and women of Europe that their own people have created democracy, proving that no European need be a slave. The great lie Hitler is spreading over the world is that there are "countries which love order", and that they are by nature the enemies of the Anglo-Saxon democracies. It is a lie because our democracy was created by all these "order-loving" peoples; America is Anglo-Saxon only in its origin; the answer to Hitler is in what all the people of Europe have created here.
They have also annihilated the myth of race by which Hitler's Germany creates a propaganda of hatred. All the peoples of Europe have lived together in amity in America, all have intermarried. Nothing in America—not even its crimes—can be ascribed to one group, nation, or race. Even the KKK, one suspects, was not 100% Aryan.
As the world has seen the German people, for the second time in twenty years, support with enthusiasm a regime of brutal militarism, a sinister retrogression into the bestiality of the Dark Ages, people have wondered whether the German people themselves may not be incapable of civilization. Their eagerness to serve any master sufficiently ignorant, if they can brutalize people weaker than themselves, is a pathological strain. Their quick abandonment of the effort at self-government is sub-adolescent. So it seems.