Frances Kellor

“ Prosperity, unusual freedom of choice in vocations, varying and broad opportunities to control the vast material resources of the country, have made us complacent about accepting the privileges of a democracy. We have argued among ourselves endlessly as to just what these privileges are and whether perhaps any of them are being infringed. But we have rarely investigated whether we ourselves are giving to the democracy the respect and service that alone can keep it secure. Americanism has become for the great mass of Americans a point of view accompanied by a lukewarm sentiment. ”

“ Men may be workmen and voters and taxpayers and bosses, but the final question for this nation to answer is—are they loyal American citizens?
In our quest for nationalism, we stand aghast at the task before us. About one seventh of our population is foreign born, and about one third is of foreign-born or mixed parentage. It is no small assimilative task to preserve the best in the traditions, beliefs, standards, and points of view of these peoples for the strengthening of America, and to give them enough of America’s ideals to make them strong citizens of a democratic country. ”

“ So long as our industrial communities are made up of large groups of un-Americanized immigrants, without the English language, without an understanding of American conditions, too helpless to bring their grievances to the attention of their employers, too ignorant to understand or trust compromises, if compromises are offered, too ignorant to force them in legitimate ways if they are not offered, able to understand only the radical agitators addressing them in their own language—just so long will the industrial history of America be blotted by Ludlows, Lawrences, and Wheatlands. ”

“ Americanism faces the future and is courageous. Nativism faces the past and is apprehensive. Never in the history of nations shall we have a greater opportunity to attain stability and leadership than now. The native American has in his own hands the power to build a great future for his land. He has the needed qualities, too; he has an idealism such as the world never witnessed before, in so high a degree as to seem naïve or childish to citizens of older races dyed in intrigue and used to always looking for the hidden motive under every apparently open move. ”

“ Medical quacks, shyster lawyers, saloon-politicians, chronically bankrupt factory owners or lessees of foreign birth are continually pointed out to us as the types that are being inflicted upon a long-suffering America. They are in fact the types that a negligent America is inflicting upon itself.
How can we expect people from all the nations of the earth, from all kinds of governments and traditions, to understand the principles of liberty, as they have been handed down to us? ”

“ We make it impossible for an alien to acquire citizenship within five years, but permit him to vote—with all that implies—in eight states after he has been there a few months. What conception can he have of how we regard this privilege and right and why has he no compunction in selling it? He leaves his home country to escape military duty and attends meetings in America where he is told he is not even expected to defend this country in case of war. Not one public school in a hundred makes any provisions for teaching him about American conditions, life, and government. ”

“ Thanks to the war, we have been freed from the delusion that we are a united nation marching steadily along an American highway of peace, prosperity, common ideals, beliefs, language, and purpose. [Pg 5] Security and prosperity have blinded us to the fact that we do not all speak the same language nor follow the same flag. We have marveled at the revelation that our own native-born sons and daughters of foreign-born parents could justify the Lusitania and defend the invasion of Belgium, and we have let it go at that, not realizing what the acceptance of this portends for future America. ”

“ It is inevitable that some expression of this should find voice at the polls, and the question is how to make the American issues so fine and big and strong and world compelling that they will engulf this great [Pg 131] human sorrow and devotion and make it of service to America. How can we in this next election make every voter feel that America is for him—to serve, to guard, to use, so we may stem the great tide of discontent, aversion, and desertion which has set in among our foreign-born voters? ”

“ For the first time in its history, America, broadly speaking, is consciously ashamed. However divided we may be upon preparedness, neutrality in thought has not brought peace of mind. We find ourselves making explanations and apologies. In the midst of unprecedented prosperity, we are restless and dissatisfied. Smoldering in the hearts of men is desire for change, fermenting in their minds is a demand for national leadership. ”

“ Some immigrants come to us with racial powers, instincts, and susceptibilities, which, however modified by years of peasant toil, have great potential value for America. Some come to us with vision trained for centuries in beauty of line and color, with the skilled hands of races that have been shaping arch or temple or cathedral for thousands of years. They feel beauty and mobility of outline as only those feel them who have lived with them for generations. ”

“ We shall never attain this united America back of our firing line, in our shops, in our cities, in our schools, on our great arteries of communications and supply, by the most intelligent policy, by the wisest of laws, by the fairest enforcement [Pg 191] of law, unless each and every American resident does his share—and realizes that a prepared America at every point comes back to him and to him alone. ”

“ When we think of a united America, our minds naturally turn to Americanizing the immigrant. Big as that task is, I do not believe that our greatest difficulty lies with him. Rather I fear that we shall have to Americanize our native Americans first—in increased respect for the flag, in conscious renewed allegiance to America, in the patriotic use of the nation’s holidays, in measures of national service. ”

“ Let him but recognize once for all that the foreigner’s needs are the same as his needs, that everyone wants a decent home and a place to sit in, and book or paper to read, a safe place to keep his savings, a chance for himself and his family to keep well,—all the varied needs of the body and the soul,—let him but recognize that the alien and the native-born both need and desire these things, and then make it his responsibility to provide them and the battle will be won. ”

“ Can we become a really strong nation if Americanization is for native-born men and women only, while we do nothing for the millions of foreign-born men and women who constitute our reserve strength?
These and many other similar questions must be included in any adequate program of defense, and yet in no council of government or of citizens have they been given the consideration their importance demands. The great immediate task before us is mobilization and Americanization, the welding of the many races and classes in this country into one enduring, steadfast, efficient nation. ”

“ We fill our night schools by adjusting them to the industrial organization and securing its coöperation. We fill our civilian training camps by the coöperation of employers in granting absences and paying wages. We obtain a common standard of living by enforcement of laws that set the standard. Civic and philanthropic agencies may be the pioneers, the educators, the balance restorers; they can care for the waste and discover causes. But America has too long regarded them as the unifiers of its many peoples, as the makers of citizens. ”

“ We have indeed deteriorated when we have come to regard simple acts of justice, fair play, service, obligation, and duty as acts to be persisted in only when the immigrant is duly appreciative! Such a stimulus would have done little to develop the northwest and to conquer the resources of the country. The man who hesitates to build houses for his homeless or commuting workmen because it may be paternalism, closes the club-house he has provided because it is not appreciated, or bewails his empty playground as a species of rank ingratitude. ”

“ We see the field of transportation and distribution cut into small sections by local regulations and local competition. One state is pitted against another to secure labor for the development of the individual state—with no thought of national needs.
Surely we cannot, in all fairness, expect the immigrant to distribute himself wisely, to protect himself adequately, to educate himself intelligently, to become a willing citizen without the full coöperation of the native American. Yet upon this whole matter we have no national sense of responsibility, no national consciousness. ”

“ The American press is increasingly proud of its position as one of the very greatest of our social institutions. It is run for labor, for capital, for society, for business, for the man in the street; but it is run very little for the foreign-born citizen or alien who against odds is trying to accomplish his own assimilation. ”

“ What we are really suffering from is not undue expansion but undue contraction, a determined withdrawal of native Americans from the real situation in America, a positive refusal to face their destiny, a stupid neglect to provide anything for the immigrant but a job.
It seems to me the height of complacent nativism to ascribe our social and political evils to unrestricted immigration, when as a matter of fact we have never developed facilities for assimilating them or given the matter much constructive attention of any kind. ”

“ The nationalization of business is not a matter of legislation, or of regulation, or of coercion. It is the duty and obligation of each responsible person in industry—all working together on a national coöperative basis instead of on a local, sectional, competitive basis. It means a new spirit abroad in business—patriotic Nationalism.
We have come to regard universal service, with a period of compulsory training in a military camp, as a measure of military defense only. ”

“ America needs national incentives and national rewards outside of politics. America needs leaders who see its future in terms of international duties, Americanism, and efficiency—a synonym for preparedness.
Will America achieve these things? I believe the next few years will indicate whether America shall endure as a great nation or become a colony of states and sectional interests. The responsibility rests squarely upon the shoulders of each and every one of us. ”

“ We turn to our schools and ask them what they have been doing in the way of preparing the voter—what has he been taught about America and its government, institutions, and opportunities? How have these been related to his own local civic life? What sense of national service has he acquired in his town school? Alas—we find there is nothing held so cheap as the American vote, and the last form of preparedness is that for voting. Of the American boy we require that he shall be born here, and shall be 21 years of age. ”

“ We so seldom think of laws and courts as educational, as incentives to right doing, but always as punitive, even though this may be the immigrant’s first contact with this leading American institution.
An immigrant lands in America and gets whatever work he can. He does not know, and no governmental agency takes the trouble to tell him, what particular restrictions there are on any given occupation. No one explains to him for which job he has to have a license or which occupations are open only to citizens. ”

“ The pay envelope has made a poor melting pot, and America is to-day paying the cost of an experiment that has failed. Whenever we have established lines that make our native Americans inaccessible to our foreign-born residents, there we have established the unknown quantity in fixing the responsibility for the immigrant standard of living, without which knowledge the truth can never be ascertained. ”

“ It is not too late for the American to face about from his nativism, from his contentment with considering only the needs and interests of the native born, and to consider the needs of America as a whole, America as he sees it and meets it every day, in his shop or mill,—the America of the native born and the foreign born as well. ”

“ There is no ceremony, no pledge of allegiance, no occasion made patriotically memorable in the mind of the boy when he casts his first vote. No one makes him welcome as a citizen of the country. He registers in his home town in an automatic way, and if he thinks of voting in the future as an obnoxious duty that interferes with his business or week ends, it is surely not entirely his own fault. ”

“ When the twentieth-century Americans “mutually pledge to each other” these things, we shall cease talking about “reasonable preparedness.” We will arm and train all our manhood. We will restore democracy to the twentieth century. And we will restore Americanism to America!
Restoring our real traditions of liberty is not a vague task. The general principles of liberty as stated in the Declaration of Independence are, in part, very practically interpreted in the Constitution. ”