DEMOCRATIC 
 g4MERICANIZATI0N 
 
 CA Criticism and 
 CA ^olicY^ 
 
 V gM. e. ravage 
 
 CONTENTS: 
 
 Standardizing fhe Immigrant 
 Tlie Immigrant s Burden 
 TKe Task foi^ cAmericans 
 
 Reprinted for 
 
 THE ^PEOPLES OF g^MERICA SOCIETY 
 
 from THE cNEW <51EPUBLIC 
 
The Peoples of America Society 
 
 An organization of Americans of all origins, 
 which in the midst of a new wave of know-noth- 
 ingism, is seeking through mutual knowledge to 
 eliminate friction and promote good rela- 
 tions among the peoples of the United States. 
 
 GENERAL COMMITTEE 
 
 Grace Abbott 
 
 Jane Addams 
 
 George L. Bell 
 
 Allen T. Burns 
 
 Herbert Croly 
 
 Felix Frankfurter 
 
 Mrs. J. Borden Harriman 
 
 Frederic C. Howe 
 
 Isaac A. Hourwich 
 William L. Leiserson 
 Bishop F. J. McConnell 
 Louis F. Post 
 M. E. Ravage 
 Father John A. Ryan 
 Dorothy Whitney Straight 
 Lillian D. Wald 
 
 Executive Office 
 41 union square 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
Standardizing the Immigrant^ 
 
 IN MORE ways than one the Amerizanization Conference just held 
 in Washington at the call of the Secretary of the Interior was a 
 vast improvement upon its predecessor of a year ago. The personnel, 
 to begin with, was more varied; the official note was less terrifying and 
 more enlightened; the protestant forces were both present and vocal; 
 and the questionings and interpellations from the floor were of a char- 
 ter that would have been deemed a year ago unthinkable. A year ago 
 the assemblage was brought together, like a posse comitatus, to con- 
 front a menace. It deliberated in the thickening shadows of a poly- 
 glot boarding house. Therefore, quite naturally, and as men always 
 do when they are frightened, it rattled the sword somewhat liberally. 
 It voted for a one-language country, and considered measures (as the 
 Mayor of New York still does) for suppressing the public use of immi- 
 grant languages and for the forcible feeding of English to foreigners. 
 Therefore, also remembering that the term immigrant means, largely, 
 the impecunious laborer, the gathering was made up, ninety-nine to the 
 hundred, of captains of industry and their subalterns. 
 
 The subalterns of industry and the non-coms of the chambers of 
 commerce were, even this year, very much over the shop — in the chair, 
 in the official hierarchy, and on the floor — and labor was again con- 
 spicuously out of it. It had been thought essential (at least it was so 
 rumored in the lobby) , that the Conference should present an orthodox 
 front to Congress and the public, because there was an integral rela- 
 tion between its proceedings and the passage or failure of a well-known 
 appropriation bill. 
 
 For all that, the constitution and the spirit of the body presented 
 a very appreciable advance on its forerunner. Among the three or 
 four hundred men and women present there were college professors, 
 factory managers, motion-picture experts, state and municipal officials, 
 an agent or two of the National Security League, settlement workers, 
 and the largest aggregation of teachers of English that had ever, I fancy, 
 been brought together under the same roof. 
 
 Wew Republic, May 31st, 1919. 
 
 3 
 
The Conference was opened Monday morning by the Federal 
 Director of Americanization. He made an address which purported 
 to reveal The Purposes of the Conference and Plans of the Americani- 
 zation Division. About fifty other speakers made addresses. The Fed- 
 eral Commissioner of Education also spoke. In fact, like most gather- • 
 ings of its kind, it was addressed nearly to extinction. For two whole 
 days the Conference labored morning, afternoon and evening in a 
 desperate effort to discover the aim of its existence. It looked as if 
 the majority of the speakers had made up their minds in advance that 
 Americanization was wholly and exclusively a problem in English 
 instruction. Specialists of every conceivable species — phonograph 
 people, stereopticon people, direct method advocates and indirect 
 method advocates, visualists and cinema promoters — pleaded convinc- 
 ingly and at length for their particular hobbies. The assembly was 
 struggling in a fog. For all practical purposes immigrants untaught 
 in English and illiterates were bracketed together and filed as synony- 
 mous. And the silent mass who had come from the ends of the 
 country for light were bewildered and grew visibly and increasingly 
 irritated. 
 
 Except for Mr. Wilbur Phillips's enlightening exposition of the 
 National Social Unit Organization, it wasn't until the third day that 
 the Conference dashed through into the open road. It broke out of 
 its paralysis early Wednesday morning, when the handful of heretics 
 ascended the platform. First of the new order was Dr. Nathan Peyser, 
 Director of the Educational Alliance, and he was followed, during the 
 lucid intervals, by Mr. H. A. Miller of the Mid-European Union, by 
 Mrs. Simkhovitch of Greenwich House, by Mr. George L. Bell, some- 
 time secretary of the California Commission on Immigration and 
 Housing, and by two or three others. Among the others, Mr. Reginald 
 Herber Smith, former counsel to the Legal Aid Society of Boston, in 
 a speech that was far and away the most brilliant of the half -hundred, 
 delivered a broad hint as to the real locality where resided the respon- 
 sibility for the messy complication often and euphemistically described 
 in the past two days as the Americanization Problem. He piled up 
 instance upon instance of our law's delays and inequalities, and of its 
 inaccessibility to the dumb, bewildered, penniless immigrant, except, 
 of course, in its punitive phase. 
 
 It was Dr. Peyser who opened the guns with his paper on Foreign- 
 Bom People Generally. "Generally" was the very word that the ear 
 of the Conference had been straining for all this while. It had been 
 
 4 
 
driven to utter despair by the martinets. It had come to be taught 
 something about the human implications of the question it was called 
 upon to solve. It wanted to know a few of the realities that lay back 
 of the academic symbol Immigrant. It longed to hear the facts about 
 the multi-colored European background, the American and European 
 factors in immigration, the newcomer's preconception about the New 
 World, the problem that the American milieu presents to the foreigner, 
 the character of the much-made-of effects he lugs over here in his 
 bundles, the reasons for his disappointment, the things that America 
 could do to make herself irresistible to him as a bidder for his loyalty, 
 his constancy, his affection, and his cooperation. It had been treated 
 instead to a swollen sub-committee on the technique of teaching English, 
 grandiloquently styled an Americanization Conference. And it was a 
 wholesome thing to hear the warm applause that fell to these speakers 
 when they touched upon the broader aspects of the relationship of the 
 America of yesterday and the America of to-morrow as comprehen- 
 sively as their limited time and their outrageously limited number 
 allowed. For their generous reception left little doubt of the demo- 
 cratic temper of the pit, and incidentally conveyed a hopeful hint of 
 how readily the robust American constitution can forget the war and 
 recover from its sickly excesses and abnormalities. 
 
 It is not to be supposed that those who had arranged the meeting 
 and a goodly lot of those who had been invited to share in its program 
 had gone about the business without a point of view or a policy. Not 
 by any manner of means. The point of view, if it were quite ethical 
 for an outsider to formulate it, might be stated somewhat like this: 
 
 America is a closed corporation. The country was settled and built up 
 in a somewhat remote past by the colonists of a single well-known country. We 
 are the descendants of those colonists, and we are therefore the Americans. 
 It happened that we made a good thing of it, so that others were attracted to 
 our shores. But these others are interlopers. Our political system, our cul- 
 ture, our ideas of life and its practices are by this time set, fixed, and, broadly 
 speaking, immutable, just as our language is^ The newcomer, if he wishes 
 to remain among us, must become like us. He must learn our ways and our 
 traditions and accept them unquestioningly, just as he learns and accepts the 
 English language. We are ready and willing to help him. We are indeed fully 
 aware that there may be some things in his inheritance which are of tolerable 
 interest. We know, for instance, that he can make some very jolly pots and 
 laces, and that his women-folks can prepare schnitzels better than we do. We 
 are glad to learn from him in these directions. After all, we are liberals. 
 We are happy that he does have a sort of tradition. We thought well enough 
 of it to help him fight for it recently. It lends a certain color and picturesque- 
 
 5 
 
ness to his otherwise unprepossessing appearance. But we regret to state 
 that we are not just now in the market for these curious wares of his. Our 
 country is past the stage where she can assimilate foreign elements and modify 
 her destiny. Of course we want the immigrant to particpate in our democracy 
 and all its blessings. But he wust be willing to participate in the status quo. 
 He may join us at the table, so to speak, but he must refrain from changing 
 the traditional rules and upsetting the household. 
 
 Unhappily this inviting program was not stated by the Federal 
 Director of Americanization when he spoke of the purposes of the Con- 
 ference. Perhaps he had not thought it all out even for his own guid- 
 ance. And the consequence was that the company was sailing about 
 over uncharted seas. I could conceive time and again of some be- 
 wildered delegate arising in his place and addressing the rostrum in 
 some such words as these : 
 
 It is all quite excellent, ladies and gentlemen. Your every proposal taken 
 by itself seems to me to be very sane and practical. Your technique, if I 
 am any judge, is altogether faultless. I am free to confess that the majoSrity 
 of your suggestions would never have occurred to my unsophisticated intelli- 
 gence. But one thing, I am constrained to tell you, lias occurred to me; and 
 I rise to ask you whether you will not set my mind at rest. The question is: 
 What is it you are trying to do? I may be exaggerating its importance, but 
 I cannot escape the feeling that the question is fundamental — that whatever the 
 goal may be that you have set before you, it is not unlikely to influence the 
 course you will have to follow. You say you want to Americanize the immi- 
 grant. Very well. I think it is a most pious project. But is it not a little 
 vague without further definition? It is to me. I understand perfectly what 
 it means to Americanize. It means, I venture to guess, to render people and 
 things American. But, you see it is not as if the whole United States was one 
 enormous Americanization Conference. Just now, out in the lobby, I heard 
 an industrial investigator, an employee of this government, a man who has 
 made some researches in industrial relations, ask some of my fellow-delegates 
 to help him resolve a difficulty. He had found in his investigations that labor 
 resented the "welfare- work" of capital and dubbed it paternalism and un- 
 American, while the employers were fighting the demands of the workers and 
 dubbing them Bolshevism and un-American. Outside of this hall and over 
 the entire country there is just now raging a rather warm dispute about what 
 is really American; while inside here there is either a divine unanimity of 
 opinion on the point, or— I say it without disrespect— no opinion at all. My 
 question, in a nutshell, therefore, is: What is this Americanism with which 
 you are so eagerly pursuing the immigrant? What is the future you have 
 mapped out for America? 
 
 Is there an answer to this question, I wonder? I think there is. 
 I think, in fact, that there are several of them. I have one, at least, 
 myself. And I propose to divulge it in my next article. 
 
 6 
 
The Immigrant's Burden^ 
 
 THE mere fact that our relationship to the newer peoples in our midst 
 has come to such a pass that we speak of it as a Problem (just 
 like that, with a capital) is, I take it, a tacit admission that there has 
 been failure in our past dealings. That is the plain definition of the 
 word. The existence of neighbors is an ordinary and, on the whole, 
 an acceptable phenomenon. It is not the rule to worry about them 
 greatly, any more than it is normal to worry about one's own feet. It 
 is only when the shoe pinches that feet become a problem; and then 
 the employment of the term is a scientific way of proclaiming that one's 
 relations to them have not been quite what they might have. 
 
 How has it come that we are at this late date, after a century of 
 immigration, faced with a very grave Americanization Question? For 
 there is, as a matter of fact, a problem of internal accommodation in, 
 America vastly sorer and touchier than the fashionable phrase gives 
 any hint of. It is idle for immigrants — who, of all people, should know 
 better — to dismiss the whole recent fury of discussion and activity as 
 a gratuitous improvization for the exercise of busybodies thrown out 
 of employment by the truce in Europe. And it is flippant and disin- 
 genuous for Americans to answer that there would not have been any 
 problem if there had been no immigrants. 
 
 The answer, to put it plainly, is that we have been unneighborly 
 at the start and undemocratic at the finish. We began to set up a 
 festering condition by indifferently disregarding our own tradition and 
 the obligations it imposed on us, and we ended by breaking faith with 
 ourselves altogether as a step toward curing what we could no longer 
 endure. First we coddled ourselves into a comfortable belief that the 
 foreigner would somehow have to make the most of what we offered 
 him, since he was of no use to us while we were indispensable to him; 
 and then, when we found that he was shaping his life in accordance with 
 his own alien specifications and utterly ignoring those we had outlined 
 and had told him nothing about, we grew alarmed and went and in- 
 formed him, in no mincing terms, that in a democracy the unregenerate 
 must do as they are told by their elders and betters. 
 
 Had we been at least well informed about ourselves we should have 
 known that one of the reasons why immigrants flocked to our shores 
 was because we could not go on civilizing a continent single-handed. 
 The country of our first origin had never been large; her human re- 
 
 iNew Republic, June 14, 1919. 
 
 7 
 
sources were limited; she was creating huge empires in every comer 
 of the earth; and ever since our well-known family wrangle she had 
 preferred to pour her none too numerous issue into more submissive 
 laps. From the moment it became necessary for us to throw our gates 
 wide open to all comers, America had ceased to be the private estate 
 of a single people to expand into a colony of the world where the entire 
 race of Europe (always feeling as one community, but cursed with an- 
 cient and meaningless dissensions) might make a new start. We could 
 have found this out by merely trying out our faith when the test came. 
 But it so happened that we had in the meantime grown fat and prosper- 
 ous, and had (as a corollary to our young respectability) developed a 
 rare case of the dominant race complex. Therefore the footsore new- 
 comers who had been spurred on their way by the vision of a new hope 
 arrived to discover that the ghost of the Old Word had not been laid in 
 mid-ocean; while we, seeing them come, coldly and disdainfully gath- 
 ered our skirts about us and moved uptown, to complain forever after 
 from our front porches of the noisome foreign colonies that kept form- 
 ing in our back-yards. 
 
 We disapproved of the foreign colony. Well, that was a symptom 
 of returning health, at any rate. No one ever had approved of it. The 
 newcomer certainly did not. The foreign colony was not especially 
 conceited about itself. It had been bom of necessity and was being 
 kept alive by neglect. It was a stage in transition, and it never ceased 
 looking forward to its own happy dissolution. There had never been 
 an immigrant, in the old days, who did not pray for the day when hef 
 should be taken up into the general stream of American life. So it 
 was good to hear that the veterans had at last made up their minds to' 
 join hands with the rookies and were going to do something about it. 
 Thereupon we proceeded to withdraw behind bolted doors and to resolve 
 in caucus that the existing state of things was unwholesome and danger- 
 ous, and that it must at all costs be changed. We omitted to inquire' 
 what precisely the state of things was, or how it had been brought about, 
 or by whom. We did not take the pains to leam the temper of tha 
 human masses with whom we were presumably to work toward the better 
 future. With our incorrigible lack of interest in Old World affairs, 
 we asked nothing about the immigrant's past or his problems or his 
 aspirations, and listened to nothing, and found out nothing. To cap 
 the climax, we adjoumed to our posts and initiated operations without 
 deciding what the altered state of things, assuming that we could get it, 
 was to be. 
 
 8 
 
But we did do something. We issued a proclamation about Amer- 
 icanism and invited our fellow-citizens-to-be, on pain of deportation, 
 to subscribe to it one hundred per cent. The foreign colonies heard it, 
 charitably passed over the promised penalties, and congratulated one 
 another. Americanism was what they had been waiting to hear all these 
 years. It was for Americanism they had made the weary pilgrimage 
 at such tragic cost. They thought of Jefferson and the Declaration 
 and the Bill of Rights — of the whole Revolutionary tradition— and 
 of Lincoln's "all the people"; and gleefully declared that the United 
 States was once again going democratic. A hundred per cent was, to 
 be sure, a bit sudden and intransigeant; but that was to be attributed 
 to the high enthusiasms of war-time, and need not, as it could not, be 
 taken literally. 
 
 In due time the smoke cleared, and the immigrant congratulations 
 grew thinner and rarer. It became increasingly evident that even if 
 the shell was the same, the creature that peeped out of it was new. We 
 went about talking of Americanism very much in the way that the Mar- 
 quis of Lansdowne talked of civilization, meaning our own private 
 brand of the thing. The refugee from the Old World rubbed his eyes 
 and perceived that a curiously familiar trick of history had repeated 
 itself. A parvenu industrial middle class, with a stake in the game, 
 had appropriated the national inheritance and branded it with its own 
 seal. With his characteristic blend of hard sense and sentimentalism, 
 the new patrician sailed forth among the imported plebs to urge it to 
 adopt his grammar and his bathtubs, his soap and his patriotism. Jef- 
 ferson and Lincoln had shrunk into Mr. Easley and the honorable James 
 M. Beck. The glory of the Fathers had become desiccated into the 
 American Defense Society. Clearly this was not the old American 
 tradition; it was the new traditional Americanism. Consequently, the 
 heart-sick European who had set out in search of Atlantis on the strength 
 of her glad promise to liquidate the old barriers of Europe with their 
 hatreds and disasters, told himself that if it must be a repetition of 
 exclusive, monopolistic nationalism, why then he still had his own 
 somewhere in his bag, which at least had the virtue of having come to 
 him with his mother's milk and of being something he could understand. 
 He had traveled to America because he had been told that in America 
 he could be himself without offense to his neighbors and without coercion 
 from them. He had not fled from one Austria to hunt up another, just 
 for the pleasure of the voyage. So the foreign colonies which had pre- 
 pared to capitulate to an ally, so as to lend a hand in the building of 
 
 9 
 
"Best Booh on Americanization" 
 
 An American m tlie Making 
 
 By M. E. RAVAGE 
 
 Secretary Lane, writing to 
 his assistant, says of this hooh: 
 
 THE SECRETARY OF THE INTERIOR 
 WASHINGTON 
 
 Jamarft^t 1919. 
 
 K/ d*ar Hcr^tt- 
 
 Uaz Bavage has iirltt«n th« iMist 
 iMok on Aserloanizatlon I Taism ot and Z 
 thoce^t It voald b« a good id«a-lf-««-oiotild 
 gett hia to tell his story* Pleaso I»ep him 
 in oiad* 
 
 CordiaU^yonrs* 
 
 Boa. Bsrbert Kaofmaa, 
 
 Special. Assistant to the Secretary. 
 
 Inc. 10253 [See other side] 
 
An American 
 In the Making 
 
 By M. E. RAVAGE 
 Theodore Roosevelt wrote: 
 
 "If any one asked me what constitutes 
 Americanism, I should refer him to your 
 capital book, especially to its final chap- 
 ters. You have made a substantial addition 
 to the doctrine of Americanism. With 
 genuine insight and convincing manner 
 you reveal at once its strength and the 
 points at which it needs strengthening." 
 
 Post 8vo. $1.75 
 HARPER & BROTHERS, New York 
 
 Established 1817 
 
the new order, hastily threw up barricades in self-defense until such time 
 as their forces could withdraw to old bases. They are at this moment 
 retiring in battalions; while we, scandalized at their ingratitude and 
 injured in our feelings, are at a loss to decide whether we ought to re- 
 strict immigration or emigration. Meantime the democracy of the Old 
 World, having got word of the counter-revolution in the New, resolved 
 that the cure for the European evil lay, not in wholesale desertion over- 
 seas, but in manfully grappling with it and demolishing it at home. 
 Wrecking operations are merrily on, with a million of our boys watch- 
 fully waiting for emergencies. 
 
 If we have mishandled matters, our failure was only proportion- 
 ate to our task. For the job we had on our hands was as overwhelm- 
 ing and unprecedented as our opportunity. We may take what com- 
 fort we can in that thought, and in remembering that the future is long 
 and forgiving. Surely no country — or, at least, no democracy — ^has 
 been put to it as we have. It was easy enough for Austria, but Austria 
 had no reputation to live up to. We had. Our aims had to be dif- 
 ferent, if for no other reason than because of what folks thought of us. 
 We could not go in for repression and domination, even if we had wanted 
 to. Besides, our aims really were high. In our own bungling way we 
 genuinely meant to raise these new people to our level, so that they 
 might buy stock in the concern later on. Hence our approach and our 
 methodology were bound to be different. 
 
 But it was precisely in our procedure that we fell down and be- 
 trayed ourselves. Americanization, which ought to mean a reintegration 
 of mankind in this hemisphere with an open mind toward the future, 
 became through our impatience and our ineptitude a thing to frighten 
 children with. The very word acquired such a disreputable and un- 
 American ring that the immigrant who had the necessary lack of self- 
 respect to submit to the process was, by that act alone, displaying the 
 poor stuff that was in him and demonstrating his undesirability as a 
 partner in America. For the process, in very truth, was a congeries of 
 screaming inconsistencies and irksome caprices. We demanded a com- 
 plete break with the ties and devotions of the past as an earnest and a 
 test of loyalty to the present. We played the civil host by insisting on 
 extravagant expressions of gratitude for our hospitality, and were irri- 
 tated when the gratitude (at best a churl's virtue) was not forthcoming. 
 We never ceased reminding our guests of the gifts we were bestowing, 
 and regularly forgot to acknowledge the privilege of their presence. In 
 the morning, if it was our whim, we threatened to outlaw their speeds 
 
 10 
 
and their memories, and the next afternoon, if it suited our ends, 
 coaxed them to deck themselves out in their outlandish garb, to sing 
 hymns to us in their quaint dialect and to entertain us with their aston- 
 ishing reminiscences. By way of returning the courtesy, we proudly 
 invited them to inspect our ancient crest and our noble family tree and 
 the portraits of our heroic ancestors, and while they did so we turned our 
 backs and let our menials bully and despoil them. 
 
 All of which might conceivably have been but a trifling lapse in eti- 
 quette if these people had been ordinary guests. But, alas! they were 
 not ordinary guests. They were not even ordinary paying guests. 
 They were strangers whom we knew to be prospective settlers in our 
 midst, whom we urgently needed as neighbors and fellow- workers, whom 
 we honestly expected to become the sharers of our responsibilities and 
 our fortunes, of our common duties and our intimate hopes, of our tra- 
 ditions and our destiny. And it was these people whom we sought to 
 train to know their place as inferiors in order that they might in the 
 near future become fit to be our equals. 
 
 The immediate problem, then, as I see it, is the reestablishment 
 of an atmosphere of mutual confidence and good-feeling between Ameri- 
 cans by inheritance and Americans by choice. It will be I have no 
 doubt, a hard row to hoe at this hour of the day, but it will have to be 
 done if anything more ambitious is to be undertaken in the future. 
 What immigrant and native may do for one another, and what both 
 together may do for America, will be the theme of my concluding article. 
 
 The Task for Americans^ 
 
 LOOKED at casually and from the outside, our work for the future 
 is very neatly and with tolerable completeness cut out for us. It 
 consists in fitting the late arrivals into our midst to the terms and condi- 
 tions of American life. That here is a pressing need, that herein we 
 have a duty and an opportunity, there can be no question. However 
 democratic you and I may be, however keen our misgivings may be at 
 the prospect of a dead uniformity artificially induced, the sheer pros- 
 perity and welfare of the stranger himself, to say nothing of the con- 
 tinued unity of our common life, demand and justify a degree of inter- 
 ference. There is a level below which entire self-management is not 
 to be had, and insistence upon it is mere ideology. Infants must be 
 fed and guided, regardless of their fathers' views about self-determina- 
 
 iNew Republic, July 16th, 1919. 
 
 11 
 
lion; and inside a given period the outlander shares the rawness and 
 helplessness of childhood, though without sharing its privileges and 
 immunities. Before it is possible for him to decide on the quality and 
 the adequacy of the machinery which we have installed in our national 
 household, before he can even take a hand in the running of it, he will 
 have to make its acquaintance. 
 
 It is for us to facilitate the readjustment of the alien to his new 
 life. We are the stalwart, adventurous elder sons of the European 
 family who braved the wilderness and blazed the trail. Now the time 
 has come for the youngsters and the old folks to follow us, and of course 
 we will give them whatever of our experience may be of help to them. 
 There can be no two opinions on that. But, emphatically, facilitate is 
 the word. The problem of making Americans out of the newer immi- 
 grants is not our problem. It is the newcomer who has to learn, at 
 the cost of no end of humiliation, that postage stamps are sold in drug 
 stores, that shopkeepers do not haggle, that eggs sell by the dozen and 
 walnuts by the pound. It is he who has to find his way about in alien 
 streets and alien laws and usages. And it is he, not we, who must 
 master the oddities and absurdities of a strange tongue whilst his mind 
 is taken up with the struggle for a livelihood at fantastic trades. Hap- 
 pily he has us to advise and to guide him. We can read the sign-posts 
 on the corner and interpret them to him. We were bom to the speech 
 and the manner, and with due patience and intelligence and good-will 
 we may perhaps convey some share of our knowledge to him. It hap- 
 pens to be to our interest that he shall not be maimed, that he shall not 
 lapse into crime, that he shall not spread contagion; therefore we can 
 well afford the cost of keeping him informed about our institutions and 
 their pitfalls. But all this, which we benevolently worry over as our 
 Americanization Problem is not, obviously, America's problem at all. 
 As far as Americanizing the foreigner goes, the burden is chiefly the 
 foreigner's, and it is America in fact that constitutes his problem. 
 
 I believe with all my heart that the teaching of English to the late 
 comers is wholly desirable, and, in a sense, even fundamental. It is 
 of the utmost importance that peoples of various origins living side 
 by side shall agree on some common medium of communication as a 
 first step toward mutual understanding. But teaching English is, ex- 
 cept technically, no sort of a problem. It is entirely a matter of time 
 and the proper instrument. America wants the foreigner to learn Eng- 
 lish, and the foreigner wants to learn it; and there is an end to the diffi- 
 culty. There is no reason why the continental immigrant should not 
 
 12 
 
want to acquire our speech; and there is every reason why he should. 
 Had the language of America, by some historical mishap, been German 
 or Magyar, or even French, its acceptance by Poles or Slovaks even 
 on this side of the water might indeed have been problematical. But 
 English lies luckily outside the area of European animosity. The posi- 
 tive advantages, moreover, to the stranger of knowing the speech of 
 the land are the strongest arguments in its favor. He must have it in 
 order to prosper in his business, and in his dealings with the native, as 
 well as for communication with other foreign groups. In addition, 
 English is one of the great world languages of culture, and the more 
 intelligent foreigner embraces the opportunity of learning it as a gate- 
 way which opens up the treasures of a splendid literature. It needs, 
 therefore, no clever propaganda to induce him to accept it. We have 
 only to put the facilities in his way, and, if our industrial arrangements 
 leave him the needed leisure and energy, he will, we may rest assured, 
 avail himself of them. 
 
 But the Anglicanization of the immigrant, and indeed his complete 
 readjustment to American life, does not even touch the fringes of the 
 problem in hand. The task before us is of quite another sort. What 
 confronts America is the need of convincing the newer peoples of the 
 genuineness and sincerity of her mission and her professions. 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 cooperation than when you began. 
 I say winning advisedly; because, that, as I see it, is distinctly our prob- 
 lem. To readjust himself to the American environment is the task for 
 the immigrant, and no one can do it for him. But it is the first prin- 
 ciple of hospitality to clean house thoroughly when guests are coming. 
 Only so can the impression we make upon him be both effective and 
 lasting. 
 
 The task is not for the propagandist. It is for the statesman 
 and the whole American people. We will have to abandon our deep- 
 rooted notion that public opinion is formed by the editorial column and 
 the movie sermon. The immigrant pieces out his picture of America 
 not by what the paragrapher and Mr. Creel tell him on the sixteenth 
 page of the newspaper, but by the accounts of actual happenings which 
 he finds on the front page. Above all he gains his impressions, just 
 as we all do, by his own personal contacts with the life about him. The 
 
 13 
 
alien may be dumb, but we are in error when we suppose that he is 
 also deaf and blind. He is quite competent to distinguish between 
 news and advertisement. 
 
 It is all too easy for us to tell him that the American tradition is 
 for freedom of conscience, but he knows that actually some of our 
 gentlest citizens are pining in prison for the sake of their consciences. 
 The propagandist may din it into his ears that America believes in law 
 and order and the freedom of expression, but from the very same news- 
 paper which carries the dope of the official information bureau he learns 
 (on the news side of the sheet) that lawless mobs in uniform have 
 broken up meetings and violated free speech, and nothing said or done. 
 He would far more readily give credence to our protestations anent the 
 sanctity of childhood if we could prevent the news from reaching him 
 that our Supreme Court has declared the child sweating law unconsti- 
 tutional. And he would have the implicit faith in the fairness and 
 democratic temper of our public education which we are asking him 
 to have, if we summarily exiled Mr. Tildsley to that Prussia which 
 inspires him. 
 
 Our business, in very brief, is to live up to our character and to 
 our promises. It is of no earthly use to distribute the Gospel among 
 the heathen, unless our lives are sufficiently Christian to tally with 
 Gospel principles. It only makes matters worse. It invites attention 
 to the glaring contrast between practice and profession. It is by the 
 tradition of the Fathers that we attempt to gain converts to our polity, 
 and as long as we fail to live by that tradition, the sole effect of our 
 sermons is to lay us open, in the eyes of our new neighbors, to the 
 charge of backsliding. Wherefore, until the time comes when we can 
 square our conduct with our book, it would be the part of wisdom 
 to keep the book locked away on our shelves. 
 
 For the European immigrant expects a great deal of us, both in 
 consequence of his own development in the past century and because 
 of his too literal credence in our protestations. In the past century 
 Europe has traveled far in the path of democracy — ^vastly farther than 
 we ever suspect. While America was busy clearing a continent, the 
 Old World was making a terrific struggle for freedom. While Europe 
 was passing through the upheaval of '48, America was having her '49. 
 This divergence during a hundred years of progress is, I believe, at 
 the root of the misunderstanding between the European who migrated 
 to America in the eighteenth century and his cousins who followed him 
 
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hither in the nineteenth. And there will never be any modus vivendi 
 between the two until that gulf is somehow bridged. The American 
 of today still thinks of democracy as his great-grandfather thought of 
 it — as a detached political ideal above the life of every day. The 
 recent European immigrant associates democracy with his actual daily 
 life — an affair of bread and butter and the schooling of his children 
 and the roof over his head. And the gap which separates him from 
 his preaching neighbor is widened still more by his realization that 
 America's nationalization problem, like all problems of its kind since 
 the children of Jacob built pyramids for the Pharaohs, consists princi- 
 pally in the irritation generated at the points of contact between em- 
 ployer and employee. It is he, the foreigner, who is, broadly, the em- 
 ployee, and his American employer seems to attempt a solution, in the 
 traditional manner, by homily when nothing but deeds and a spirit 
 of cooperation will suffice. 
 
 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 immigrants can be won over, 
 we must Americanize America herself. We must lift American insti- 
 tutions and American practice 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 fashion- 
 ing 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 good-will 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. 
 
 This, at least, is how I view the much discussed Americanization 
 Problem; and I am but one of many citizens who have been made into 
 Americans out of immigrant material, and who have had such a struggle 
 in the face of recent events to stay made. The question in our minds 
 is whether America has saved enough of the spirit of democratic fellow- 
 ship and idealism out of the consuming fire and destruction of two 
 years of war to approach her great task in the manner worthy of her 
 splendid past. 
 
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