History of a literary radical, and other essays

by Randolph Silliman Bourne

Along with dual citizenship we shall have to accept, I think, that free and mobile passage of the immigrant between America and his native land again which now arouses so much prejudice among us. We shall have to accept the immigrant’s return for the same reason that we consider justified our own flitting about the earth. To stigmatize the alien who works in America for a few years and returns to his own land, only perhaps to seek American fortune again, is to think in narrow nationalistic terms. It is to ignore the cosmopolitan significance of this migration. It is to ignore the fact that the returning immigrant is often a missionary to an inferior civilization.

This migratory habit has been especially common with the unskilled laborers who have been pouring into the United States in the last dozen years from every country in southeastern Europe. Many of them return to spend their earnings in their own country or to serve their country in war. But they return with an entirely new critical outlook, and a sense of the superiority of American organization to the primitive living around them. This continued passage to and fro has already raised the material standard of living in many regions of these backward countries. For these regions are thus endowed with exactly what they need, the capital for the exploitation of their natural resources, and the spirit of enterprise. America is thus educating these laggard peoples from the very bottom of society up, awaking vast masses to a new-born hope for the future. In the migratory Greek, therefore, we have not the parasitic alien, the doubtful American asset, but a symbol of that cosmopolitan interchange which is coming, in spite of all war and national exclusiveness.

Only America, by reason of the unique liberty of opportunity and traditional isolation for which she seems to stand, can lead in this cosmopolitan enterprise. Only the American—and in this category I include the migratory alien who has lived with us and caught the pioneer spirit and a sense of new social vistas—has the chance to become that citizen of the world. America is coming to be, not a nationality but a trans-nationality, a weaving back and forth, with the other lands, of many threads of all sizes and colors. Any movement which attempts to thwart this weaving, or to dye the fabric any one color, or disentangle the threads of the strands, is false to this cosmopolitan vision. I do not mean that we shall necessarily glut ourselves with the raw product of humanity. It would be folly to absorb the nations faster than we could weave them. We have no duty either to admit or reject. It is purely a question of expediency. What concerns us is the fact that the strands are here. We must have a policy and an ideal for an actual situation. Our question is, What shall we do with our America? How are we likely to get the more creative America—by confining our imaginations to the ideal of the melting-pot, or broadening them to some such cosmopolitan conception as I have been vaguely sketching?

We cannot Americanize America worthily by sentimentalizing and moralizing history. When the best schools are expressly renouncing the questionable duty of teaching patriotism by means of history, it is not the time to force shibboleth upon the immigrant. This form of Americanization has been heard because it appealed to the vestiges of our old sentimentalized and moralized patriotism. This has so far held the field as the expression of the new American’s new devotion. The inflections of other voices have been drowned. They must be heard. We must see if the lesson of the war has not been for hundreds of these later Americans a vivid realization of their trans-nationality, a new consciousness of what America means to them as a citizenship in the world. It is the vague historic idealisms which have provided the fuel for the European flame. Our American ideal can make no progress until we do away with this romantic gilding of the past.

All our idealisms must be those of future social goals in which all can participate, the good life of personality lived in the environment of the Beloved Community. No mere doubtful triumphs of the past, which redound to the glory of only one of our trans-nationalities, can satisfy us. It must be a future America, on which all can unite, which pulls us irresistibly toward it, as we understand each other more warmly.

To make real this striving amid dangers and apathies is work for a younger intelligentsia of America. Here is an enterprise of integration into which we can all pour ourselves, of a spiritual welding which should make us, if the final menace ever came, not weaker, but infinitely strong.

FRAGMENT OF A NOVEL

Gilbert was almost six years old when they all—Mother, Olga, and baby—went to live with Garna in her tall white house. And his expanding life leaped to meet the wide world, with its new excitements and pleasures. It was like a rescue, like getting air when one is smothering. Here was space and a new largeness in things. Gilbert was freed forever from the back-street.

Garna’s house was ridiculous but it was not despicable. For your meals you went down into a dark basement dining-room, behind a blacker kitchen. And the outhouse, buried in Virginia creepers and trumpet-vine, was down a long path bordered by grape-vines, where you went fearfully at night. Gilbert was afraid of this dark, long after he was old enough to be ashamed that his mother must come with him and stand protectingly outside. In winter, the stars shone at him with icy brilliancy, and the vines made a thick menacing mass around him.

Back of the house was a pump, painted very bright and green, where the water came up cold and sparkling and ran suddenly out of its spout over your shoes unless you were careful. And when they had finished pumping, the well would give a long, deep sigh, whether of fatigue or satisfaction, Gilbert never knew. In the dark kitchen, which you entered down a flight of stone steps, there was another pump, but it brought forth, after long persuasion, only rain-water which to Gilbert tasted uninteresting, and which he was not allowed to drink, but which they carried in zinc pails up two long spidery flights, and for Aunt Nan’s room, three, so that you could wash your face in the morning. Only on wash-day was that pump interesting when the servant filled great wooden tubs out of it, and created huge foamy waves in them, and beat and rubbed, and then filled long clothes-lines with damp white garments which coiled around you clammily and disgustingly if you ran too close under them when you were playing.