People were surprised at a phrase I used not long ago, and quoted it right and left, as if I had made a great discovery, when I said that every ship that brings over the immigrants is another Mayflower. Why, I can not think of it in any other terms. Ships are now made to run with steam instead of with sails, and our forefathers did not come in the steerage because the Mayflower wasn't built that way.
You see I am not sticking to my text—a proof of an inexperienced speaker. But I am not a speaker. I am a witness on the witness stand. I have been called from the ranks to testify. Now each of you is in the same position. It would have been an impertinence on my part to get up before a body of scholars without a finished address, if I had any idea that I was going to make an intellectual contribution. I simply answer to my name as a witness, and each of you can do no less: testify to what you know. Now remember I am not asking this for the sake of the immigrant. If this were the proper time and place I would tell you just how, in what order, my interest in the immigrant on the one hand and in America on the other developed. With me it was America first, and it still is so. I was not conscious of the immigrant as a special class of our citizenship until I became conscious of certain American problems. It is with me the immigrant for the sake of America, not America for the sake of the immigrant, and I beg you to believe me. And why do I insist that all the truth you know about the immigrant shall be brought out? I am not speaking—I can not repeat it emphatically enough—because I am an immigrant, not even because I represent that specially large group of immigrants, the Jews. If America should go back on its ancient traditions and close its hospitable doors, the Jews would suffer bitterly. But what is one more disappointment in the history of the Jews? They have known how to lift up their hearts and thank God for disappointments before. They would simply adopt another dream. It is not for them that I speak. Nor is it because I am a great lover of justice. I want to see that justice is done to the stranger, to be sure; let us know all sides of the immigrant that no injustice may be done. But the thing that makes me speak to you more than any other is my love for America, for the ideals that I was taught to cherish in the public school. I took everything in my school books literally; when I read that this is the land of freedom; that the door is open to all worthy men and women, and that all shall have an equal opportunity. I want to hold you to that, to a literal interpretation of those terms.
I went back to Russia two years ago, to Polotzk on the Dvina, the city in the Pale where I was born, and again I felt as I felt in the beginning, when I first came here, after seeing how those people over there regard us. They still take us at our word. When we turn them away at the gate, for this and that petty excuse at the bottom of which is some selfish motive that we do not dare to acknowledge, they are bitterly disappointed. And yet they are not the worst sufferers. It is we who suffer, we as Americans, for in turning them away we abandon our ideals, and lose the consciousness that we are still conserving the ideals of our forefathers. It always seems to me that in our attitude towards the immigrant, more than in any other branch of our national policy, we make manifest our true ideals. In our formal dealings with foreign governments we may make blunders, we may betray weaknesses, but on the whole these matters remain a secret with the foreign ambassador. The people at large do not follow very closely these dignified negotiations about treaties and tariff and what-not; but as we meet these individual men and women at the gate, here we give ourselves away. There, at the gate of entrance, we, the people of America, deal directly with the people of the world. The immigrant with his million eyes is looking at us, and he will tell whether or not we still believe in the things for which we honor our forefathers on all our patriotic anniversaries.
There was a young Jewish girl working in my household as a cook, who had been through very unhappy experiences in this country, experiences which, unfortunately, have been multiplied in the lives of many other girls who come here unprotected. She told me her story once, and I saw that what hurt her more than her own misfortunes, more than the agony she had been through, more than the disgrace she had suffered, was her disappointment in America. She found that in America, in this instance that she knew of in her own life, a man may do a gross wrong and there is no way to get hold of him and punish him. She had times of discouragement when she would talk to me and complain of that thing. Oh, it shook me to find that in the mind of this ignorant, illiterate child of seventeen, we, the American people, had lost something of our prestige. I talked to her—perhaps the need inspired me—and explained to her that our laws, like the laws of civilization at large, are not yet perfect; that law and civilization are things of gradual growth; and showed her that although we are still to blame for many things that here exist, we have done far better than other people in some respects. I made it my business to try to prove to this ignorant Russian girl, my cook, who waited on me every day, that America was still America, despite some mistakes and some failings, and that, on the whole, we have gone further in the quest of justice than other nations. It mattered to me that this one girl should think we were still Americans, and surely it matters to you just as much.
Do not let these millions that come to our gates get the wrong impression of us. Do not let people with selfish interests to serve, who send representatives to Congress, speak louder than you do when this question comes to be discussed. Let the truth out every time. For the sake of our country I am asking it, not for the sake of the unfortunate foreigners. We owe them something, as a people of charitable heart, to be sure, but we owe more to ourselves and to our traditions.
This same girl of whom I speak also afforded an illustration of some of the nobler traits of many of our immigrants that you are aware of, and that you ought to testify to. I mean the reverence for learning that is found among the ignorant, the illiterate, of many of our immigrants. This girl who could not read or write a word in any language until she came to me (when gradually, by means of the cook-book, she made some progress), had a genuine reverence for learning, which is in itself half of the material for making a scholar. I kept her pretty busy in my household, as I usually do keep our maids, and sometimes, when there would be a rush of more work than I could do, I would put her to extra trouble, to bring my luncheon upstairs, perhaps, when I could not stop for meals. "Oh, Miss Antin," she used to say, "it is wonderful that I can wait on somebody who can write books!" A respect for letters such as this is not one of our prominent characteristics as Americans. I ought to have the courage of our foreign visitor, who told the truth about his people. I can do no less. We can not boast of too much reverence for learning. Is it not a great asset these foreigners bring with them, this reverence for learning? The man behind the pushcart can't read fifty lines of the Constitution, but his heart bows in reverence before the man who can, and that is worth more than the ability to read the Constitution and forget it.
There are so many ways of classifying the immigrants—as laborers, as a peril, as a help, according to one's point of view. But I always think of them as a cloud of witnesses in the tribunal of the nations. They go back and forth, in person or through letters; their experience is reported all over the world, and they tell the truth about us. The immigrant is the only visitor, you know, who comes to stay and finds us out. The tourists, the critics, the honorable guests of various honorable institutions, who are taken around in carriages and shown our best front, what do they know about us? The letters home that go out from the East Side, shiploads of letters, some of them written at dictation, sent by persons who cannot write themselves—(I used to write letters for my cook; I have never forgotten some of them)—those are the documents that go all over the world. They are forming their opinion of us in the far corners of the earth. What shall they say of us?
If you see that justice is done in the case of the immigrant, they will have no evil to say of us. Our traditions of liberty, of hospitality to the oppressed, will be realized in the eyes of the world.
Now it does not matter that the immigrants today may not be running away from religious oppression, or may not be victims of political martyrdom. Martyrdom of the worst kind is martyrdom of the spirit, and immigrants who have suffered such martyrdom are still coming to us by the shipload. It is accurate to say, in a certain way, that the immigrants in the beginning came in search of liberty, and today they come in search of bread. That may all be, but with most of our present-day immigrants, if you give them bread and nothing else, they are not satisfied. You know it. And I know what the people said in Polotzk only two years ago. If any of you thought, from reading my story, that I had put down the reminiscences of my early childhood, with the haze of the past over all, that I had idealized everything in my enthusiasm, I can assure you that while my story was in manuscript I went back to Polotzk, to find out if I had told the truth, and I found that I had. I found there my old rabbi, my teacher who taught me my Hebrew letters. I talked with various of the old scholars, who were very old when I got back after seventeen years' absence—these old men who spend their time over the Talmud in the corridors of the synagogues—and I found among them just that attitude toward America which I remembered to have existed when I came away nearly twenty years ago. They look on us today as on the upholders of justice and true liberty. They still believe in us.
Do not let them lose that faith! It is more to us than it is to them that they shall be satisfied in their high longings. That is all I ask of you. You know the immigrant as he is in the library; you have a view of him that most people have not. You send your little paragraphs to the New York papers. They are not printed big enough. Nobody sees them. Speak up and tell what you know about the immigrant, that justice may be done, that we may remain sound-headed and true-hearted in our national life, true to our traditions; and the immigrant will hear with a million ears and see with a million eyes and run with a million feet to the far corners of the earth, to cry that America is still America.