THE MELTING POT[ToC]
America has been called the "crucible" or the "melting pot" of nations, because many peoples of many races and many countries come together here, and in the heat of life and struggle are molded into Americans. President Wilson said, in a speech at Cincinnati in 1916, "America is not made out of a single stock. Here we have a great melting pot."
As soon as we entered the war against Germany, the question arose in the minds of most people as to how the large number of Germans in the United States would act. Germany had taught them that even though they became naturalized and took the oath of allegiance as American citizens, such action was not binding, but was like "a scrap of paper" to be destroyed and forgotten whenever necessity demanded, and that "once a German" meant "always a German." It seems now that Germany actually expected the Germans, who had left their native land to seek opportunity, freedom, and citizenship under the Stars and Stripes, to fight against their new and adopted home; but events have proved that most German-Americans have higher ideals of right. A leading German-American has written a book entitled "Right before Peace"; its title carries the thought that has guided most of his fellow-countrymen and their children in the United States during the World War.
A few months after the United States had declared that a state of war existed with Germany, many leading men of this country of foreign birth and parentage, signed, with others, a declaration drawn up by Theodore Roosevelt. This declaration, somewhat abbreviated but not altered in thought, is as follows. It makes very clear what America should mean to her adopted children.
We Americans are the children of the crucible. We have boasted that out of the crucible, the melting pot of life, in this free land, all the men and all the women who have come here from all the nations come forth as Americans, and as nothing else, like all other Americans, equal to them, and holding no allegiance to any other land or nation. We hold it then to be our duty, as it is of every American, always to stand together for the honor and interest of America, even if such a stand brings us into conflict with our fatherland. If an American does not so act, he is false to the teachings and the lives of Washington and Lincoln; he has no right in our country, and he should be sent out of it; for he has shown that the crucible has failed to do its work. The crucible must melt all who are cast into it, and it must turn them out in one American mold, the mold shaped one hundred and forty years ago by the men who, under Washington, founded this as a free nation, separate from all others. Even at that time, these true Americans were of different races; Paul Revere and Charles Carroll, Marion, Herkimer, Sullivan, Schuyler, and Muhlenberg were equals in service and respect with Lighthorse Harry Lee and Israel Putnam. Most of them, however, were of English blood, but they did not hesitate to fight Great Britain when she was in the wrong. They stood for liberty and for the eternal rule of right and justice, and they stood as Americans and as nothing else.
So must all Americans of whatever race act to-day; otherwise they are traitors to America. This applies, especially to-day, to all Americans of German blood who, in any manner, support Germany against the United States and her Allies.
Many pacifists have during the last three years proved themselves the evil enemies of their country. They now seek an inconclusive peace. In so doing they show themselves to be the spiritual heirs of the Tories, who, in the name of peace, opposed Washington, and of the Copperheads, who, in the name of peace, opposed Lincoln. We look upon them as traitors to the Republic and to the great cause of justice and humanity. This war is a war for the vital interests of America. When we fight for America abroad, we save our children from fighting for America at home beside their own ruined hearthstones. To accept any peace, except one based on the complete overthrow of Germany as she is under the ideals of Prussia and the Hohenzollerns, we believe would be an act of baseness and cowardice, and a betrayal of this country and of mankind.