America Faces the Future

contribute to the symphony of American life. Professor Dewey has recently put it thus: "The way to deal with hyphenism is to welcome it, but to welcome it in the sense of extracting from each people its special good, so that it shall surrender into a common fund of wisdom and experience what it especially has to contribute. All these surrenders and contributions taken together create the national spirit of America." Mr. Rabindranath Tagore has sharply criticized the mania for stereotyping manners and ideas that he, like many other observers, finds in this country. "America lacks respect for unlikeness, for otherness. Its democracy seeks to make all men alike, to run them into one mold, to rob them or shame them out of their picturesqueness or diversity. Americanization seems to mean that when all accept a certain formula it is enough; but old racial traits and cultural characteristics can not be ironed out of humanity. Nor should they be. It is not a melting-pot that is needed, but a flower-garden, where each race may bloom and add its beauty to the commonwealth."

Above all things, we must banish that patronizing, contemptuous air that so many Americans of the older stock assume toward the more recent immigrants. We must sternly rebuke the use of those derisive nicknames that prolong antipathy and beget resentment. If their ignorance and low standard of living irks us, the remedy is obviously to give them education and better living conditions. If they become a menace to our institutions, or to our standards of living, it is far less due to their recalcitrancy than to our neglect.

We must remember, also, that the teaching the alien receives is a small part of the influences that are at work upon him. In the words of a recent bulletin of

the federal Department of Education, "The immigrant is becoming either Americanized or anarchized by every experience which he undergoes, every condition to which he is subjected. Americanization is in a measure the problem of the school. But it is also a matter of prevention of exploitation, of good housing, of clean milk for babies, of adequate wages, of satisfactory industrial conditions, of the spirit of neighborliness between Americans, old and new. Everything that touches the immigrant's life is an instrument for his Americanization or the reverse." In general it may be said that if the immigrant finds himself well treated in this country he will be loyal. Kindness, courtesy, justice, opportunity for a normal human life for himself and his children-this is the obvious way to make the newcomers to these shores patriotic American citizens.

We must confess that our record is far from clean in this fundamental respect. Listen to the words of one who is thoroughly conversant with the situationnot an agitator or alien but a conservative and earnestly loyal American: "The immigrant arrives at the port of entry. After passing his examination (during which time not a friendly word of greeting is given him, or a personal interest taken in him) he is turned loose upon the city, to be met at the gate by cabmen, porters, runners, crooks, thieves, and every conceivable kind of exploiter interested in getting his cash money. This is America's first reception line. He then meets our second reception line-the employment agent, the private banker, and 'steering agent,' who derive profit from his labor before it has even become productive. When the immigrant actually goes to work, he has generally lost his money and is in debt. He then meets our third American reception

line, the employer interested only in his labor output, and he is treated accordingly . . . By the time the immigrant has shaken hands along these various reception lines he feels he knows everybody, and he has a very definite idea of liberty, justice, freedom, law, order, and measures of happiness, which in no sense accords with our forefathers' ideal of America."

This same writer describes an industrial plant where immigrants are employed. "His men sleep five to fifteen in a room, often on the floor and in their clothing; they have no care and eat badly prepared food. They crowd family houses, destroying privacy and morality . . . One native-born American controls the health, decency, morality, and efficiency of some 8,000 immigrant workmen, whose only protest is to move on, and whose only future is high enough wages to return to their home country. And the worst of it is that men get used to these conditions, believing them to be American; and with this belief go the dreams, the visions, and the ambitions which are the essence of good citizenship. The prospective good citizen is sacrificed to the demand for cheap labor, which is a native-American demand."

Conditions are, of course, by no means always so bad as this. But they are sometimes as bad, and they are seldom anywhere near what they ought to be. This is the crux of the problem of Americanization. These people are being fashioned not by what we preach to them, but by what we do to them. How can they believe in the sincerity of our professions of idealism when they find themselves exploited on every hand and unable to live a decent human life? Actions speak louder than words; and what they see is a scramble for profits, a race in which the clever and the aggressive and the fortunate push their way

to a competence, while the timid and conscientious get pushed to the wall. They see honest and brave men deported or sent to prison for daring to voice opinions contrary to the accepted creed. They find themselves with little "effective liberty," little actual equality of opportunity; their democratic rights are apt to seem a mockery. Only efficiency seems a genuine American ideal-an efficiency in whose name they are treated as mere unthinking "hands." Often they are bitterly disillusioned in their dreams of America. No doubt they are often partly to blame. But the greater blame rests upon the rest of us, who allow them to be so bewildered and exploited and driven to a disillusionment so rapid and so harsh.

The writer of a magazine article that has appeared since the above words were set down has so well expressed the root of the matter that some sentences of his are best appended: "You may give the alien evening schools and continuation schools; you may teach his wife in the home and his daughter in the factory; you may flood him with reprints of the Declaration of Independence and the speeches of Lincoln; and when you have finished, you will be no farther along the road of winning his heart and his co-operation than when you began.

"What we have to do is, therefore, clear enough. It is not, as the now popular phrase has it, that we must Americanize the Americans. It is much more than that. Before the immigrant can be won over, we must Americanize America herself. We must lift American institutions and American practices to the high plane of America's own traditions. We must come to look upon the immigrant as he is, a boon to us and an equal, instead of a nuisance and an uninvited invader. And we must somehow meet his ideal

of us and our country by fashioning them in the mould of the ideals and the aspirations of the twentieth century. When we have done this much, life itself will take care of the future. For America is still very much in the making, and it will require the energy and the goodwill and the traditions of all the peoples of the earth, working together, to make her what she started out to be, a greater and a freer and a nobler Europe."

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