The World War brought this division sharply to a head. It split the Socialist party and drove out of it most of the American-born moderates; it led to the attempt by these moderates and many of the former Progressives to organize the “National party” and the “Farmer-Labor party,” which attracted a small following in the presidential election of 1920. The excesses committed against foreign-born citizens of nearly all racial groups in the zeal of the war spirit undoubtedly drove into the extreme radical ranks a large number of foreign-born citizens who in normal times would have been content with political methods and would have diminished in their radicalism as their economic status improved. Doubtless, also, the period of unemployment and industrial depression following the war, ensuing as it has upon a period of unprecedentedly high wages, has tended to encourage radical thought.
But it must always be remembered that the extreme radical movements have directly relatively little political influence. This for two very good reasons: In the first place, experience has not justified the theory of the “Reds” that terrorism in this country will frighten government into concessions. It has, in America, anyway, quite the opposite effect. It alienates public sympathy and impels the average man, normally sympathetic toward the “under dog,” to approve of repressive measures. Furthermore, the members of these ultraradical organizations, although they may be technically citizens, are not voters in any practical sense.
THE “I. W. W.” AND THE HOMELESS WORKER
This latter consideration is more important than is commonly realized. The rank and file of the Industrial Workers of the World—better known as the “I. W. W.”—for example, is made up of men without fixed abode; itinerant workingmen, largely, though by no means wholly, of foreign birth. They have left their homes and families, if they ever had either. The I. W. W. is the only organization which at least pretends to look after the interests of the homeless, jobless worker. The homeless, jobless worker cannot become naturalized, because the naturalization process presupposes a fixed residence, and witnesses who can testify to that residence over long periods of time. And even if the man be native born or long since naturalized, he cannot vote or otherwise function as a political unit because he has no fixed home from which to register and vote.
A fixed abiding place, a home, is psychologically a sine qua non of real and wholesome civic interest, as well as a legal prerequisite for participation in public affairs. Theoretically, a native-born or naturalized citizen has a membership in and duty toward the United States. Actually, the degree of his participation depends upon the depths of his roots in some locality, and the relation of that locality to the civic unit toward whose welfare the voter contributes, not only his taxes, but his personal interest. A good part of the trouble with city government in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, and other great cities is due to the fact that so many fine, public-spirited voters live in suburbs.
Thousands of the best men who participate in the daytime in the life of New York City live in New Jersey and Connecticut, or, anyway, in towns outside of Greater New York. Their real interests are in New York, but they vote in another state. They contribute little to the local welfare in the places Where they live because of their real interest in New York. Consequently their civic vitality, so to speak, is entirely lost to both communities—and to the United States. The foreign-born voter in the crowded East Side of New York is a far more effective citizen, for good or ill, than the presumably more intelligent business man who cannot—or at any rate does not—participate substantially in the political life either of the city where his business and daily activities are carried on, or in the village in another state where he has his legal residence.
Over against this anomalous condition put the case of the well-meaning citizen, native or foreign born, who works for a certain mining corporation in Illinois. The town where he lives belongs absolutely to that corporation. It so happens that a part of the mining property of that corporation lies in Illinois and a part in Indiana. Under stress of business and mining conditions the company suddenly moves the whole population, men, women, and children, over the state line. What must happen then to any possible civic interest or enthusiasm—supposing any to exist—on the part of American citizens, voters, who had begun to think about the public interests of the state of Illinois? What happens to the naturalization proceedings begun by any alien to make himself a useful citizen of his adopted country? How can any real civic interest live under such conditions?
It is common to sneer at the city workingman because he stays in town unemployed when he might get a job in the wheat fields or at mining or fruit picking where labor is scant. Laying aside the question of any desire on his part to stay with his family, or any doubt in his mind about his ability as a hodcarrier or a tailor to make good as a farm hand, or any reluctance on the part of the railroad to assist him with the gift or loan of transportation to some distant and practically most uncertain job—what becomes in such a hop-skip-and-jump sort of industrial—and social-existence, of any interest in civic affairs? To a newly made citizen, who has faithfully memorized, if you please, the Constitution of the United States, who knows just how Senators are elected and what is the relation between the functions of the President and those of the local dog-catcher, and who can sing, duly standing uncovered, all the stanzas of the “Star-Spangled Banner,” it must appear that his intellectual equipment for citizenship is more or less extraneous to the practical and immediate task of feeding his wife and babies!
It is this sort of experience, of shifting employment and residence and the conditions that go with it, that has given momentum to the I. W. W. and kindred movements. “Stag towns” in the Far West, matching “women towns” in New England; permanently separated families; the utter impossibility of getting and keeping wives or maintaining any sort of decent, not to say normal, domestic life, are major factors that have brought into such organizations not only foreign-born wanderers, some of them naturalized, but a surprisingly large number of native Americans—the latter particularly among the leadership.
On the other hand, the I. W. W. from its beginning[176] has paid close attention to the immigrant. Fifteen years ago, at the second convention of the I. W. W., it was urged that propaganda should start in Europe before the immigrant left the homeland, so that he would be prepared upon arrival in this country to join the organization. This was not done, but even so early there was a large issue of printed matter in foreign languages, and the whole machinery was conceived on the presumption of a polyglot membership. Moreover, the I. W. W. always has taken the most liberal position as regards any form of race prejudice. At the opening of the first convention William D. Haywood took a strong stand against discrimination against the negro by craft unions, and the organization never has tolerated any distinction of race, color, nationality—or sex. Even with regard to the Japanese of California, at the third convention a delegate from that state declared that “the whole fight against the Japanese is the fight of the middle class of California, in which they employ the labor faker to back it up.”