Right Above Race

by Otto H. Kahn

The world fervently longs for peace. But there can be no peace answering to the true meaning of the word—no peace permitting the nations of the earth, great and small, to walk unarmed and unafraid—until the teaching and the leadership of the apostles of an outlaw creed shall have become discredited and hateful in the sight of the German people; until that people shall have awakened to a consciousness of the unfathomable guilt of those whom they have followed into calamity and shame; until a mood of penitence and of a decent respect for the opinions of mankind shall have supplanted the sway of what President Wilson has so trenchantly termed "truculence and treachery."

God strengthen the conscience and the understanding, the will and the power of the German people so that they may find the only way which will give to the world an early peace, the only road which, in time, will lead Germany back into the family of nations from which it is now an outcast.

From each successive visit to Germany for twenty-five years I came away more appalled by the sinister transmutation Prussianism had wrought amongst the people and by the portentous menace I recognized in it for the entire world.

It had given to Germany unparalleled prosperity, beneficent and advanced social legislation, and not a few other things of value, but it had taken in payment the soul of the race. It had made a "devil's bargain."

And when this war broke out in Europe I knew that the issue had been joined between the powers of brutal might and insensate ambition on the one side and the forces of humanity and liberty on the other; between darkness and light.

Many there were at that time—and amongst them men for whose character I had high respect and whose motives were beyond any possible suspicion—who saw their own and America's duty in strict neutrality, mentally and actually, but personally I believed from the beginning of the war, whether we liked all the elements of the Allies' combination or not—and I certainly did not like the Russia of the Czars—that the cause of the Allies was America's cause.

I believed that this was no ordinary war between peoples for a question of national interest, or even national honour, but a conflict between fundamental principles, aims and ideas. And so believing I was bound to feel that the natural lines of race, blood and kinship could not be the determining lines for one's attitude and alignment, but that each man, regardless of his origin, had to decide according to his judgment and conscience on which side was the right and on which was the wrong and take his stand accordingly, whatever the wrench and anguish of the decision. And thus I took my stand three years ago.

But whatever one's views and feelings, whatever the country of one's birth or kin, only one course was left for all those claiming the privilege of American citizenship when after infinite forbearance the President decided that our duty, honour and safety demanded that we take up arms against the Imperial German Government, and by action of Congress the cause and the fight against that Government were declared our cause and our fight.

The duty of loyal allegiance and faithful service to his country, even unto death, rests, of course, upon every American. But, if it be possible to speak of a comparative degree concerning what is the highest as it is the most elementary attribute of citizenship, that duty may almost be said to rest with an even more solemn and compelling obligation upon Americans of foreign origin than upon native Americans.

For we Americans of foreign antecedents are here not by the accidental right of birth, but by our own free choice for better or for worse.