VII
MAKERS OF GOOD NEIGHBORS
To Begin With. Who and what are the good neighbors in our country that are most powerful in changing this many-tongued multitude into Americans? Who are influencing them so that they understand us and we understand them? What forces are welding these many fragments into one nation?
To receive into one great common home millions of sons and daughters strange to that home and to one another in speech, custom and land, and to blend them into one people, this seems an impossible task. And yet it is being accomplished.
The Public School. Among the good neighbors that are grappling with this great task most effectively I place the public school first, because I believe it the most useful neighbor in making young Americans. Frequently the foreign-born parents see the New World largely through the eyes of their children, so that the school is a good neighbor to the whole family.
The public school makes different nationalities friendly. All school boys know how by studying together, reciting together and playing together they acquire respect for one another, and learn to look over the barriers of race. A public school near my church which is made up almost wholly of Jews and Italians, elected one of my Sunday-school scholars, a Japanese boy, president of the class, simply because his ability and good manners had won their respect.
Manual Training. By manual training classes the public school promotes respect for work with the hands. We cannot understand the foreigners’ contempt for this kind of work, but it is very strong. I once took an Armenian, who had come all the way to America in the hope of getting an education, to the president of a preparatory school in the hope that he might be admitted free of expense by doing some work about the institution. The president stated that the school was overcrowded, but he would take him in if he would work in the field a couple of hours a day. The Armenian, who was really an earnest man, felt the work would too greatly degrade him, and declined.
Teaching in the English Language. The English language is of course another great help in Americanization.
The City and the Immigrant Child. The child of the immigrant is in special need of the help and sympathy of all American boys and girls. Frequently he is the sole person in the home who speaks English, and so is called upon for advice and is consulted in many things upon which American fathers and mothers never need to consult their children. This is unfortunate for him, as we can readily see. He often despises the language and customs of his parents and then ends by despising the parents themselves. He cannot understand the love his parents feel for their homeland; he cannot see the blue skies and green hills and mountains so dear to them; he cannot feel the home attachments.
“I recall a certain Italian girl,” writes Miss Jane Addams, “who came every Saturday evening to a cooking class in the same building in which her mother spun in the Labor Museum Exhibit; and yet Angelina always left her mother at the front door while she herself went round to a side door, because she did not wish to be too closely identified in the eyes of the rest of the cooking class with an Italian woman who wore a kerchief over her head, uncouth boots, and short petticoats. One evening, however, Angelina saw her mother surrounded by a group of visitors from the School of Education who much admired her spinning ability, and she concluded from their conversation that her mother was the ‘best stick spindle spinner in America.’
“When she inquired from me as to the truth of this deduction I took occasion to describe the Italian village in which her mother had lived, something of her free life, and how because of the opportunity she and other women had had to drop their spindles over the edge of a precipice they had developed a skill in spinning beyond that of the neighboring towns. I dilated somewhat upon the freedom and beauty of that life, how hard it must be to exchange it all for a two-room tenement and to give up a beautiful homespun kerchief for an ugly department store hat. It was easy to see that the thought of the mother with any other background than that of the tenement was new to Angelina, and at least two things resulted; she allowed her mother to pull out of the big box under the bed the beautiful homespun garments which had previously been hidden away as uncouth, and she openly came into the Labor Museum by the same door as did her mother, proud at least of the mastery of the craft which had been so much admired.”