Americans, Do Not Be Discouraged:
We Have Been Fighting These Tyrants
For Three Hundred Years!
Many of us looked upon these men as somehow sneaking into a privilege, overlooking the fact that they were bringing us a gift!
ASSIMILATING THE ENEMIES OF TYRANNY
We are hardly yet awake to the wonder of what happened, to the magnitude of the work of national assimilation that took place all in a moment. We were very stupid about it. One of the most important officers of our army, charged with great responsibility in the preparations for the war, naïvely confessed some time after the United States had entered upon it, that he did not know who were the Czecho-Slovaks, or from what part of the world they came! And it was only with the greatest difficulty that the army authorities were made to realize that most of the races making up that political nightmare known as Austria-Hungary desired nothing so much as the chance to help overthrow the unspeakable tyranny from which they had fled, against which they and their fathers had “been fighting for three hundred years.” Better than the Allies themselves they understood the cause of the Allies, yet to the American army authorities they were only “enemy aliens”!
It was in keeping with our statistical customs, not only in the Naturalization and Immigration Bureaus, but in the very census itself, to class an Austrian as an Austrian, knowing little and caring less about the world of difference between a Magyar and a Czech, between a Croat and a Slovak—though all were “Austrians” to the superficial eye of the census enumerator—and the General Staff of the United States army, which was going to war against “Austria” with absurdly, unpardonably vague, notions as to what an “Austrian” might be! It required a vigorous campaign of education before there could emerge even a fair, working intelligence in this regard; but emerge it finally did, and the anti-Austrian “Austrians” at last got their chance to go forth as American citizens under the Stars and Stripes to help give the coup de grâce to the old oppressor of themselves, their fathers, and their fathers’ fathers.
EPISODES OF MILITARY NATURALIZATION
In one army division, at Fort Riley, Kansas, thirty nationalities were represented by the candidates for citizenship, including not only the pseudo-Austrians, but Rumania, Serbia, Bulgaria, Montenegro, Armenia, Syria, Guatemala, Honduras, the Azores, and most of the rest of the civilized world. At Fort Riley was made the record of “forty-three citizens in forty minutes.” At Camp Devens, Massachusetts, more than 2,000 men were admitted to citizenship and took the oath of allegiance in one operation, lined up on the parade-ground by nationalities. A New York State court naturalized soldiers of fifty-six racial varieties on the first day of the visiting court.
In a session of court held in a Tennessee encampment the court crier opened the ceremonies with his, “Oyez! Oyez!” and a procession of dignitaries, military and civil, marched in under the flags for the ceremonial—a solemn invocation, an address by a venerable judge, and the crash of “The Star-spangled Banner.” Then the general made a speech, in which he welcomed each of those who a little while before had been “strangers and foreigners,” and dubbed him “one of our men.”
“Fellow citizens, comrades!” he struck home with booming voice in his peroration, “we will lash ourselves together with hoops of steel, and go forth to avenge the outrages that have been committed. There is no power on earth that can keep us from our purpose!”