It is a most dangerous error to undertake to build a national life on the individual as a unit. "God has set the solitary in families," said Moses, as he led his people through the vast wilderness unto the promised land. We may destroy all else, but leave the home and the family, and yet all the elements and works that make the nation can be once again regained and rebuilt. We may possess all else, wealth and power, all the arts and all the knowing, thriving schools and majestic temples—but if the home crumbles and decays, we perish with it utterly.
Oh! The deep, deep and terrible tragedy of our Nordic race in America! We have been decimated by fratricidal war. Our flesh and blood have been corrupted by industrialism. Now, however, we go to our destruction simply because we do not care to live. We go as blindly as a species of animals whose conditions of life have been completely upset by new forces with which they do not know how to deal. Sheep and swine, nay, the wild beasts of the field, could not act with such utter carelessness and immorality as we. All that we have done will perish with us. Other nations have lived and left record of their labors in a lofty literature or a resplendent art. The glory of the temples they have builded keeps their memory green centuries after their very language is forgotten. The people of the age of Pericles will live on in their work, to beautify and glorify humanity for twice ten thousand years. But we Americans are perishing miserably to leave no record of high value, because our greater work has been bound up in our very selves. We have all lived and labored together as free men. We have proven to a faithless world that the humblest toiler could wield the mightiest and most glittering scepter of power. We have made good the proud boast of a triumphant democracy. All that we have been, as a beckoning star among the nations, all that we have meant to the world of hope in the common man, is doomed to perish with us.
All I seek to do in these chapters is to bring the mind and heart of my country to this place. Here, in the old-fashioned American home, we shall do battle. Here we shall fight the last fight, to win or to lose. If we are to have a greater and better America, we must begin by breeding better Americans in larger numbers. There is no other way. The man who says our young men and women, in general, do not desire homes and children, says a falsehood. We neither desire nor expect fifteen children in the home. What we do insist upon, in recreating all the conditions about that home, is two, three, four, and sometimes, in exceptional cases, five or six children. For our country as a whole, during this century, we crave but a small increase in native born population in every decade—perhaps ten or twelve per cent. We would reject, by taking forethought and preventing marriage, the children of the criminal, the children of the imbecile and the insane, the children of those who are accursed with incurable diseases or incurable indolence. We would remould all that needs remoulding in order to receive into the hearts and the homes of our country the children of the healthy and the industrious, the honest and intelligent, the high-minded and the sensitive.
Give our young people of America but half a chance! Let them have their own country in which to test out the labor of their hands and the love of their hearts! Let them again lay upon themselves the first duty of the supreme law of nature! They can and will preserve to this continent every higher value, every article of faith left to their keeping. Remove from their environment a competition that is unfair and killing. Give them bread and not a stone for their toil. Give them solid assurance and not a gnawing insecurity of livelihood, and they will give to their country a future through the sons and daughters of their love.
To admit that there is a growing number of our young women who reject child-bearing as a burden is merely to re-emphasize the crying need of a socializing education. It is the work of those who know and who care, to teach those who are ignorant and careless of duty. We teach our young people that they must help prepare themselves for citizenship and self-support. Citizenship for our American young women includes the essential duty of motherhood, and for our young men the duty of the creation and support of a family. A cornerstone of our ethical teaching should be the preparation of the minds of the young for home-building and parenthood. Every able-bodied man, or woman, who deigns to eat, should perform some sort of useful work. Similarly every normal young man and woman who accepts life should be gladly willing to create life. Around and above these homes and these children we must place the protection of every means furnished by applied science. To educate them and to fit them for useful work and public service, we must apply the first fruits of our nation's wealth. To offer to these young citizens, upon maturity, full opportunity for fruitful labor and self expression, we must be ready to reject much error that is ancient, and accept much truth that is new and sometimes startling.
America consists of and exists in the home. The home is America. To lose the fight here is to lose all. To win at this point is to win for ourselves national salvation, and for the world our share in its ultimate redemption.
Let me confess that I alone am responsible for the reorganization of the Ku Klux Klan. No one suggested it to me. No one helped me in the formulation of its new task, nor in the working out of any of its basic principles or methods. So it may not be entirely uninteresting to the reader for me to close this statement with a brief narrative of the first growth of this concept in my own mind.