Newer ideals of peace

by Jane Addams

We also exhibit all the Anglo-Saxon distrust of any experiment with land tenure or method of taxation, although our single-tax advocates do not fail to tell us daily of the stupidity of the present arrangement. It might, indeed, be well to make a few experiments upon an historic basis before their enthusiasm converts us all. For centuries in Russia the Slavic village, the mir system of land occupation, has been in successful operation, training men within its narrow limits to community administration. Yet when a persecuted sect from Russia wishes to find refuge in America, we insist that seven thousand people shall give up all at once a system of land ownership in which they are experts. Americans declare the system to be impracticable, although it is singularly like that in vogue in Palestine during the period of its highest prosperity. We cannot receive them in the United States, because our laws have no way of dealing with such cases. And in Canada, where they are finally settled, the unimaginative Dominion officials are driven to the verge of distraction concerning registration of deeds and the collection of taxes from men who do not claim acres in their own names, but in the name of the village. The official distraction is reflected and intensified among the people themselves, to the point of driving them into the mediaeval “marching mania,” in the hope of finding a land in the south where they may carry out their inoffensive “mir” system. The entire situation might prove that an unbending theory of individualism may become as fixed as status itself, although there are certainly other factors in the Doukhobor situation—religious bigotry, and the self-seeking of leadership. In spite of the fact that the Canadian officials have in other matters exhibited much of the adaptability which distinguishes the British colonial policy, they are completely stranded on the rock of Anglo-Saxon individualistic ownership, and assume that any other system of land tenure is subversive of government, forgetting that Russia manages to exert a fair amount of governmental control over thousands of acres held under the system which they so detest.

In our eagerness to reproach the immigrants for not going upon the land we almost overlook the contributions to city life which those of them, who were adapted to it in Europe, are making to our cities here. From dingy little eating-houses in lower New York, performing a function somewhat between the eighteenth-century coffee-house and the Parisian café, is issuing at the present moment perhaps the sturdiest realistic drama that is being produced on American soil. Late into the night speculation is carried forward—not on the nice questions of the Talmud and on quibbles of logic; but minds long trained on these seriously discuss the need of a readjustment of the industrial machine in order that the primitive sense of justice and righteousness may secure larger play in our social organization. And yet a Russian in Chicago who used to believe that Americans cared first and foremost for political liberty and that they would certainly admire those who had suffered in its cause, finds no one interested in his story of six years’ banishment beyond the Antarctic circle. He is really listened to only when he tells the tale to a sportsman of the fish he had caught during the six weeks of summer when the rivers were open. “Lively work then, but plenty of time to eat them dried or frozen through the rest of the year,” is the most sympathetic comment he has yet received upon an experience which, at least to him, held the bittersweet of martyrdom.

Among the colonies of the most recently immigrated Jews, who still carry out their orthodox customs and a ritual preserved through centuries in the Ghetto, one constantly feels during a season of religious observance, a refreshing insistence upon the reality of the inner life, and upon the dignity of its expression in inherited form. Perhaps the most striking reproach to the materialism of Chicago is the sight on a solemn Jewish holiday of a Chicago River bridge lined with men and women oblivious of the noisy traffic and sordid surroundings, casting their sins upon the waters that they may be carried far away. The scene is a clear statement that, after all, life does not consist in wealth, in learning, in enterprise, in energy, in success, not even in that modern fetich, culture, but in an inner equilibrium, in “the agreement of soul.” It is a relief to see even this exaggerated and grotesque presentation of spiritual values.

But the statesman shuts himself away from the possibility of using these great reservoirs of human ability and motive power because he considers it patriotic to hold to governmental lines and ideals laid down a century and a quarter ago. Because of a military inheritance, we as a nation stoutly contend that all this varied and suggestive life has nothing to do with government nor patriotism, and that we perform the full duty of American citizens when the provisions of the statutes on naturalization are carried out. In the meantime, in the interests of our theory that commercial and governmental powers should have no connection with each other, we carefully ignore the one million false naturalization papers in the United States issued and concealed by commercialized politics. Although we have an uneasy knowledge that these powers are curiously allied, we profess that the latter has no connection with the former and no control over it. We steadily refuse to recognize the fact that our age is swayed by industrial forces.

Fortunately, life is much bigger and finer than our theories about it, and, among all the immigrants in the great cities, there is slowly developing the beginnings of self-government on the lines of their daily experiences. The man who really knows immigrants and undertakes to naturalize them, makes no pretense of the lack of connection between their desire to earn their daily bread and their citizenship. The petty and often corrupt politician who is first kind to immigrants, realizes perfectly well that the force pushing them to this country has been industrial need and that recognition of this need is legitimate. He follows the natural course of events when he promises to get the immigrant “a job,” for that is undoubtedly what the immigrant most needs in all the world. If the politician nearest to him were really interested in the immigrant and were to work out a scheme of naturalization fitted to the situation, the immigrant would proceed from the street-cleaning and sewer-digging in which he first engages, to an understanding of the relation of these simple offices to city government. Through them he would understand the obligation of his alderman to secure cleanliness for the streets in which his children play and for the tenement in which he lives. The notion of representative government could be made quite clear and concrete to him. He could demand his rights and use his vote in order to secure them. His very naïve demands might easily become a restraint, a purifying check upon the alderman, instead of a source of constant corruption and exploitation. But when the politician attempts to naturalize the bewildered immigrant, he must perforce accept the doctrinaire standard imposed by men who held a theory totally unattached to experience, and he must, therefore, begin with the remote Constitution of the United States. At the Cook County Court-House only a short time ago a candidate for naturalization, who was asked the usual question as to what the Constitution of the United States was, replied: “The Illinois Central.” His mind naturally turned to his work, to the one bit of contribution he had genuinely made to the new country, and his reply might well offer a valuable suggestion to the student of educational method. Some of our most advanced schools are even now making industrial construction and evolution a natural basis for all future acquisition of knowledge, and they claim that anything less vital and creative is inadequate.

It is surprising how a simple experience, if it be but genuine, gives an opening into citizenship altogether lacking to the more grandiose attempts. A Greek-American, slaughtering sheep in a tenement-house yard, reminiscent of the Homeric tradition, can be made to see the effect of the improvised shambles on his neighbor’s health and the right of the city to prohibit the slaughtering, only as he perceives the development of city government upon its most modern basis.

The enforcement of adequate child labor laws offers unending opportunity to better citizenship founded, not upon theory but on action, as does the compulsory education law, which makes clear that education is a matter of vital importance to the American city and to the State which has enacted definite, well-considered legislation in regard to it. Some of the most enthusiastic supporters of child-labor legislation and of compulsory education laws are those parents who sacrifice old-world tradition, as well as the much-needed earnings of their young children, because of loyalty to the laws of their adopted country. Certainly genuine sacrifice for the nation’s law is a good foundation for patriotism, and as this again is not a doctrinaire question, women are not debarred, and mothers who wash and scrub for the meagre support of their children say, sturdily, sometimes: “It will be a year before he can go to work without breaking the law, but we came to this country to give the young ones a chance, and we are not going to begin by having them do what’s not right.”

Upon some such basis as this the Hebrew Alliance and the Charity Organization of New York, which are putting forth desperate energy in the enormous task of ministering to the suffering which immigration entails, are developing understanding and respect for the alien through their mutual efforts to secure more adequate tenement-house regulation and to control the spread of tuberculosis; both these undertakings being perfectly hopeless without the intelligent co-operation of the immigrants themselves. Through such humble doors, perchance, the immigrant will at last enter into his heritage in a new nation. Democratic government has ever been the result of spiritual travail and moral effort. Apparently, even here, the immigrant must pay the old cost, and he seems to represent the group and type which is making the most genuine contribution to the present growth in governmental functions, with its constant demand for increasing adaptations.

In the induction of the adult immigrant into practical citizenship, we constantly ignore his daily experience. We also assume in our formal attempts to teach patriotism to him and to his children, that experience and traditions have no value, and that a new sentiment must be put into aliens by some external process. Some years ago, a public-spirited organization engaged a number of speakers to go to the various city schools in order to instruct the children in the significance of Decoration Day and to foster patriotism among the foreign born, by descriptions of the Civil War. In one of the schools, filled with Italian children, an old soldier, a veteran in years and experience, gave a description of a battle in Tennessee, and of his personal adventures in using a pile of brush as an ambuscade and a fortification. Coming from the schoolhouse, an eager young Italian broke out, with characteristic vividness, into a description of his father’s campaigning under the leadership of Garibaldi, possibly from some obscure notion that that, too, was a civil war fought from principle, but more likely because the description of one battle had roused in his mind the memory of another such description. The lecturer, whose sympathies happened to be on the other side of the Garibaldian conflict, somewhat sharply told him that he must forget all that; that he was no longer an Italian, but an American. The natural growth of patriotism based upon respect for the achievements of one’s fathers, the bringing together of the past with the present, the significance of the almost world-wide effort at a higher standard of political freedom which swept over all Europe and America between 1848 and 1872 could, of course, have no place in the boy’s mind because it had none in the mind of the instructor whose patriotism apparently tried to purify itself by the American process of elimination.

How far a certain cosmopolitan humanitarianism ignoring national differences, is either possible or desirable, it is difficult to state; but certain it is that the old type of patriotism, founded upon a common national history and land occupation, becomes to many of the immigrants who bring it with them a veritable stumbling-block and impediment. Many Greeks whom I know are fairly besotted with a consciousness of their national importance, and the achievements of their glorious past. Among them the usual effort to found a new patriotism upon American history is often an absurd undertaking; for instance, on the night of one Thanksgiving Day, I spent some time and zeal in a description of the Pilgrim Fathers, and the motives which had driven them across the sea, while the experiences of the Plymouth colony were illustrated by stereopticon slides and little dramatic scenes. The audience of Greeks listened respectfully, although I was uneasily conscious of the somewhat feeble attempt to boast of Anglo-Saxon achievement in hardihood and privation, to men whose powers of admiration were absorbed in their Greek background of philosophy and beauty. At any rate, after the lecture was over, one of the Greeks said to me, quite simply, “I wish I could describe my ancestors to you; they were very different from yours.” His further remarks were translated by a little Irish boy of eleven, who speaks modern Greek with facility and turns many an honest penny by translating, into the somewhat pert statement: “He says if that is what your ancestors are like, that his could beat them out.” It is a good illustration of our faculty for ignoring the past, and of our failure to understand the immigrant’s estimation of ourselves. This lack of a more cosmopolitan standard, of a consciousness of kind founded upon creative imagination and historic knowledge is apparent in many directions, and cruelly widens the gulf between immigrant fathers and their children who are “Americans in process.”