The Emperor Addressing First Imperial Klonvokation.
Our Cities a Menace to Democracy
Referring again to the menace of the American city to American institutions, I desire to remind the reader of the thought of some of our most profound thinkers on the great problems of democracy. Some of these views expressed at different periods of our history were prophetic, and some of them were conclusions, as though the visions of the seers were being fulfilled. In the early days of the republic when there were no great cities in our country and when the tide of immigration had just begun to flow to our shores and settle in the growing centers along the Atlantic seaboard, Mr. Jefferson said, "The American city is a cancer on the body politic." He seemed to foresee, at the very beginning of the republic, the deadly poison of anti-democracy generated among the alien people congested in our cities. In 1866 Wendell Phillips, a powerful advocate of emancipation, said, after the great conflict was ended and the Negroes free, "The time is coming when the American city will strain the government as slavery never did." He, too, foresaw the virus which the city would spread to the entire nation, attacking and consuming the great principles of democracy upon which the republic was founded. In recent years, Lord Bryce, Ambassador of Great Britain to the United States, after years of study and careful investigation, wrote that classic entitled "The American Commonwealth." In this work there was much commendation of American institutions, but the book was not without candid criticism. He said that "the conspicuous failure of American democracy is in its great cities." The clear meaning of the eminent Englishman was that the American people remained really democratic only in the rural sections and the villages. Already conglomerate population from every clime and shore had destroyed democracy in our congested centers. Only recently Mr. H.G. Wells, one of the most conspicuous, progressive thinkers in the world, looked upon New York with its seething millions, heard its Babel of languages, felt its delirious fever, and then calmly announced that Petrograd in its rust and desolation was a picture of New York in the future. In our greatest city, this profound student of social and political life saw unmistakable evidence of the real and seething madness of Bolshevism which meant the overthrow and the utter collapse of all things democratic.
We are told to-day (1920) that millions of workers in our great cities are unemployed. I reflect at once upon the figures which are placed before us. In round numbers we have, this winter, about six millions of unnaturalized foreign working people living in our cities, and almost exactly the same number of employed on our hands. What would they have us do? Are six millions more to come to us and thus give us a total of twelve millions of unemployed? What would these people all do for a living? There are simply not enough jobs in the cities for them, and it seems evident that there will not be in our generation. It is these masses, which, by sheer force of number, gave us the present insoluble problem of the city. Our cities can maintain their large populations only if the country population is increased to supply them food and raw materials on the one hand, and with markets on the other.
Overgrown cities are in themselves a menace. When the surplus is composed of unassimilated and unemployed aliens the menace is doubled,—nay, it is multiplied tenfold. The great city as at present constructed and conducted corrodes the very soul of our American life. Factory work, with every new invention of automatic machinery, progressively selects those who are more and more unfit to be Americans. A factory manager in Chicago recently amended a new rule for the selection of employees. He would hire no blondes. The big blonde people, he said, "would not stay at their machines until the whistle blew." He was evidently hunting for a people who could be trained never to move a foot, or an eye, for ten hours a day. The growth of an American is ordinarily impossible under the conditions of either great wealth or great poverty. The city simply can not furnish the character-building elements which must needs go into the making of an American. Every American child should be born to a vast heritage. This heritage should include a fine healthy parentage, clean birth, gentle care, proper nourishment and opportunity for play and education in the open country.
Is there no cause for the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan among the robust, native-born folk of the countryside? Is not the menace of the city to our ideals and institutions an urgent demand for the organization of our unspoiled rural life to save the nation from infection by the great cities?