John Palmer Gavit

“ This ensemble of tradition and significance is what makes native and newcomer alike want to be an American. This is what stirs our hearts when we see the Stars and Stripes. We prize these things not alone because they are ours, not alone because in their power and glory they are peculiarly, exclusively American; but still more because they are worthy to be prized, and because they promise the ultimate incarnation of the dreams of men of good will since ever man first lifted his eyes from the ground and visioned Brotherhood. ”

“ ESSENTIALS OF “AMERICANISM” There are essentials distinctively American upon which we can base our definition of “America” and typify her in the human being who by spirit, vision, and vigilance best represents our tradition and our aspiration. Such a definition will hold against the world—even against those of our own household who neither exemplify nor understand it. The sum total of these essentials is not paralleled now, nor in history, anywhere else on earth. ”

“ The great and inspiring revelation here has been that men of foreign and of native origin alike responded to the call to arms with a patriotic devotion that confounded the cynical plans of our archenemy, and surpassed our own highest expectations. No man can peruse the muster roll of one of our camps, or the casualty list from a battlefield in France, without realizing that America has fulfilled one of its highest missions in breeding a spirit of common loyalty among all those who have shared the blessings of life on its free soil. ”

“ Would you favor legislation to permit the naturalization of a married woman in her own name, if personally acceptable, regardless of the alienage of her husband, or his failure to obtain or refusal to seek naturalization?
Would you favor reserving to a native-born American woman, if she desires it, the American citizenship which under the present law she sacrifices by marriage to a foreigner? ”

“ Let us come straight to the fact that this absence of exclusive racial marks is the distinguishing physical characteristic of the American. True of him as of no other now or ever in the past, is the fact that he is, broadly speaking, the product of all races. It is of our fundamental history and tradition from the beginning that in America all peoples may find destination, [11] if not refuge, and upon a basis of virtual race equality mingle, and for good or ill, send down to posterity in a common stream their racial values—and their racial defects. ”

“ THE FOREIGN-BORN VOTER IN ACTION There is not and never has been in the United States anything that could be segregated as the “labor vote,” although such a thing has been the dream of many labor leaders, the bugaboo—or rather the ignis fatuus—of politicians of many parties, and a permanently legendary figure in the popular speech. The absence of such a vote is the principle reason for the political futility of most of the efforts of the Socialist parties. ”

“ Even local adherence to our slogans of liberty, democracy, consent-of-the-governed, and all the rest of our ecstatic vocabulary, no longer insulates or distinguishes us in the world. The upspringing democracies of the Old World, to which we have given example and inspiration as well as emancipation from old autocracies, swear by all these phrases as exuberantly as we, and may even outstrip us in the political incarnation of the ideals which hitherto we have regarded as so peculiarly our own! ”

“ Do you believe that the admission of large numbers of aliens under the Act of May 9, 1918, solely on the ground of military or naval service, without the usual requirements of residence, etc., operated on the whole to the advantage of the United States?
Would you favor applying the same standards and tests to all prospective voters, native and foreign born alike, before endowing them with the suffrage; with suitable ceremonies of induction into “active voting membership,” so to speak, in our society? ”

“ What must happen then to any possible civic interest or enthusiasm—supposing any to exist—on the part of American citizens, voters, who had begun to think about the public interests of the state of Illinois? What happens to the naturalization proceedings begun by any alien to make himself a useful citizen of his adopted country? How can any real civic interest live under such conditions?
It is common to sneer at the city workingman because he stays in town unemployed when he might get a job in the wheat fields or at mining or fruit picking where labor is scant. ”

“ But the fact is, also, that foreign-born women have not in any large measure awakened to the opportunity. Their devotion to their homes has taken on no public or political aspect. They are confined to those homes, not only by tradition, ignorance of American life and the English language, and the inertia of their existence, but even more by overwork and by the unremitting detail of family duty and care. They have hardly heard of their new and increasing privileges, and generally regard them, when they do hear of them, as only a new burden, unfamiliar and to be ignored if not resented. ”

“ The Naturalization Bureau and the courts have done all they can under existing law to bring to bear upon the foreign-born woman who will be made a citizen by the naturalization of her husband the influences tending to awaken in her a sense of her opportunity, privileges, and obligations. Strictly speaking, the court has no lawful right to summon a woman from her domestic duties to be a party to her husband’s naturalization. The spirit of the law of substantially all countries from time immemorial has been to regard the citizenship of a woman as merely incidental to that of her husband. ”

“ The training of the examiners always has been of the most haphazard, inadequate character. Even under the operation of the Civil-Service laws, it was held that the kind of experience a man ought to have for the field service was that of general contact with the public—that of policemen, street-car conductors, and the like. Yet, as the practice has grown up, these men have to appear in important courts virtually in the guise of attorneys for the government; they must know the law, not only as set forth in the statutes, but as interpreted in innumerable decisions of Federal and state courts. ”

“ Considering the bewilderment with which thousands of old-stock native-born voters confront the complications of our Federal, state, and local governments, and the complexity of our inordinately long official ballots, it is small wonder that, like them, the foreign-born voter, even after many years’ residence in this country, follow shibboleths and leaders who to them represent a certain definiteness and clarity of purpose and action. ”

“ The new and impressionable citizen of even but twenty years ago had held out to him at election inducements to all that was worst in his character. If he held our elections and our institutions lightly, we had ourselves to blame for it.... Man moves much along lines of least resistance, and the stranger adapts himself to conditions as he finds them. Make your elections riotous and corrupt, and your new-made, foreign-born citizen riots and sells his vote with the native-born....
The new citizen has neither political inheritance, prejudice, nor scars of conflict. ”

“ Under circumstances of tense feeling between Italians and Jugo-Slavs, between Irish and English-born, between Swedes and Norwegians, the vote of Italian-born citizens and those of Serbian antecedents cannot be corralled together for a candidate of either racial origin, or for a ticket representing sympathy or tolerance for either, and so on down the lines; but no politician ever has been able to unite in one political movement all the heterogeneous mass that could, by any stretch of words, be called the “foreign vote.” There is no “foreign vote,” any more than there is a “labor vote.” ”

“ Even if it were true that the purchasable voter was chiefly the voter of alien race, every sale implies a purchase. Before any voter can sell his vote, somebody must be prepared to buy it. The seat of corruption lies, not in the venal voter alone, but also in the system that gathers money for the purpose of buying him. And that system, from the very beginning, has been devised and engineered by the American politician, and those behind him in American business life who desire to control elections and the people’s representative selected therein, for their own “business” ends. ”

“ What is it that makes a nation of us if not a distinctive race? What is it that the immigrant joins, body and soul, when he becomes “an American”?
Every little while somebody arises with ashes upon his head and bemoans the threatened disappearance of what he is pleased to call “the American type.” ”

“ Even in the Bureau of Naturalization there was for a time more than a tendency to pursue this policy of forcing citizenship upon aliens. It was abandoned because no government can kidnap the subjects or citizens of another without getting into difficulty. There is still a good deal of confusion of thought about this matter.
The importance of it lies in the fact—obvious to any right thought about it—that we want for our new citizens only those who come of their own accord and free will. We want, moreover, only those who are right-minded. ”

“ Americanization in this study has been considered as the union of native and foreign born in all the most fundamental relationships and activities of our national life. For Americanization is the uniting of new with native-born Americans in fuller common understanding and appreciation to secure by means of self-government the highest welfare of all. Such Americanization should perpetuate no unchangeable political, domestic, and economic regime delivered once for all to the fathers, but a growing and broadening national life, inclusive of the best wherever found. ”

“ The question of means of livelihood, of a better job, is doubtless the chief factor, but it is not the only factor. Any job at all in a free country is better, for any man worth his salt, than a far better-paid job under conditions of oppression. The man who leaves his homeland to adventure even under adverse conditions, because he cannot tolerate political tyranny, used to be regarded per se as fit for American citizenship. ”