It may be that we are too late in starting this movement of "America for Americans and Americans for America." No doubt it should have been begun thirty years ago. But if we can find some method by which, after ten years of entire rejection, immigration can be narrowly and rigidly restricted, and by which the surplus population can be distributed over the vast, uncultivated area of our great country, and slowly wrought into our social life, there is yet a hope left for our country. But if alien populations are permitted, as in the past, to flood our land, colonize in our great cities, and propagate their kind with such amazing rapidity, while only native-born Americans continue to till the soil and propagate their kind in an appallingly decreasing ratio, then our country is lost and everything the fathers strove to build for posterity will sooner or later be wiped out. We do not in the least seek to hide the fact that the Ku Klux Klan is making a last stand for America as the home of Americans and Americanism.
The Failure of Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe
To the average country-born American the period of the war has been a time of painful disillusionment. There may have been among us some who, before the war, had some accurate knowledge of what was going on in the world; but the great mass of Americans were very much shocked by the succeeding event. We took the statements of the leaders of the people in Germany and Russia at their face value. It seems to me to be very much worth while, at present, to trace the various events by which we were led into knowing what central and eastern Europe were really thinking and doing. Let us recall our first period of disappointment. We had always believed that the parties of the people in Germany, especially the great social-democratic party, had the power to prevent the Kaiser from undertaking a war of conquest. The declaration of war was to be the signal for a revolution and the creation of a republic. This was rather taken for granted, without investigation, by reading people all over the world. When we saw the entire German nation, with hardly an exception, turn quite insane with the war spirit, we sat back and wondered what this people was really like.
It was also a generally accepted theory among us that the German immigrants who came to us had left Germany because they disliked the tyranny of its government. Then, in 1914, with a suddenness that quite took our breath away, came the propaganda of "Kultur." The entire German nation, through every means it had of speaking to the outside world, informed us blandly that it possessed a system of society infinitely more efficient and desirable than democracy. "It is Germany's duty under God," wrote Bernhardi, "to give her superior culture (Kultur) to all inferior peoples." Indeed, the war itself was generally interpreted by Germans as an act of charity and self-sacrifice upon their part. At the time the idea was so new to us that it took us just three years to really comprehend what was going on in Europe. Even President Wilson, in 1916, declared publicly that we did not know the real causes of the War.
We may or may not have completely destroyed the Germany autocracy; but we may be sure we have by no means done with the system of Kultur. It is all too easily put into practice. The stupendous machinery and organizations of modern industry presents a perfect maze of social problems for solution. Kultur is, by far, the easiest way out. The direction of the whole business of life is simply turned over to a "great man" or to a small clique. People everywhere are naturally lazy and morally irresponsible. For the thinking and characterful minority there come times of mental anguish and disillusionment. To-day the times tempt us to despair. We are almost driven to lose faith in the majority and so in government by the majority. "Why not try a change," "it could not be worse;" we hear it said on every hand. So, perhaps, we in America may yet try Kultur. Certainly we shall if we again have unrestricted immigration. When democracy fails, some form of monarchy will be our only salvation from oligarchy; and an oligarchy is more dangerous to freedom than monarchy. A monarchy, with our peculiar industrial development and our great propertyless masses, means Kultur.
In the midst of the Great War came the Russian revolution. We sat back and said, "How fine! Now they are going to follow our example by building a great Russian Republic, which will soon break down the German autocracy." Even now most of us do not begin to understand what has really happened. What we do know is that the Bolshevists have not only created a state of universal starvation, disease, and despair throughout Russia, but they have also tried to spread their system throughout Europe and the world. To this end they have made foreign war and conducted an enormous and costly world propaganda. As I write we learn that, while we were voting credits and collecting funds for the starving in Russia, they were paying $30,000 to a single agent to execute a single murderous bomb-plot in New York City.
In our last chapter we quoted Mr. H. G. Wells's statement that New York City will be the next Petrograd. This observation can be, by no means, taken jocularly. Go in our present course, and Bolshevism will be, in all our larger cities and industrial districts, the natural alternative for monarchy. Compelled to choose between the two, our original American people will probably divide and civil war will result. Lenine and Trotsky did not create Bolshevism. Bolshevism grew as naturally as a rank weed on a dunghill. It sprang from ignorance and poverty and despair. It will appear wherever ignorance, poverty and despair are mixed together. Quite likely we shall have, with unrestricted immigration, a Bolshevist revolution first, then monarchy and Kultur.