Civic righteousness and civic pride

Front matter

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Preface

The problems which are the most vital and most interesting to the great mass of our people are civic problems. National questions are more remote and unreal. Life centers in the city; its governmental functions concern the family, the individual, our own flesh and blood, directly. The education of children, the righteous administration of the business of the community, communal rights, the preservation of law and order, the housing of the population, the care of the poor, the suppression of vice, the treatment of the alien, the inter-relation of men and women, all these matters and many others come home to us with directness and force. These questions are absorbing the attention of very many thoughtful men and women; they are the concern of such great organizations as the National Municipal League and the National Economic League. Much literature is in existence upon the technical and administrative aspects of these problems; very little has been written upon the moral side.

Yet these questions are all at bottom, moral questions. They cannot be settled by schemes

PREFACE and projects, however well thought out, nor by model city charters, nor by the referendum, nor by any other similar device alone. The final factor is the human factor, the redeemed man in the redeemed city, and no solution is possible which does not take into consideration the teaching of the Master of Men. ‘The sermons contained in this volume were prepared with this belief profoundly in view. They aim to discuss civic questions from the old prophetic standpoint modified by the vision of Jesus as it must be worked out in terms of every day living. At the time they were delivered they were widely quoted by the daily press. And they are now printed upon the insistence on the part of many friends that they will be helpful to others than those to whom they were immediately addressed.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE I Civic RigHrrousNEss AND Civic PRIDE 1

X Tue Fours or Civic ADOLESCENCE 121

I

II America: The Melting Pot!

And it shall come to pass in the last days, that the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established in the top of the mountains, and shali be exalted above the hills: and all nations shall flow unto it.— Isaiah 2: 2.

The greatest of the prophets dreamed of the age of universal brotherhood, when the barriers between people and people should be broken down, and the nations should fuse and flow together, drawn to Jerusalem by a spiritual gravitation as strong as that mighty call in obedience to which the rivers flow from the mountains to the seas. So far as Jerusalem, the holy city of Israel, is concerned the prophecy will never be fulfilled, but it is being fulfilled in America today, as the peoples of every nation are flowing together in a mighty stream, beneath the portals of the promised land. There was a time when I felt pessimistic and hopeless about the problem of immigration. I feel so no longer. I do not deny that there are very grave aspects of this problem, that there are

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serious questions which confront our American cities in relation to the foreign population, but I believe that these problems may all be solved if we have patriotism enough and faith enough. I believe this, because I believe that there has been from the first, a divine providence in the migration of the peoples of the earth to America. ‘The same God-given impulse which sent Abraham out of his own city to found a new people, the same impulse which sent the Pilgrim Fathers over the western ocean to lay the foundations of this Republic, has sent the representatives of all the old races to become integral parts of the brotherhood of humanity which we are creating slowly and painfully, not without sacrifice and tears, in our America. I would not dare to believe otherwise than this. I do not believe that history is merely a blind fumbling with the keys of fate. I believe that God is visibly init. This is a part of that eternal purpose which has run through all the ages. God intended this land which we call ours to be the great school of opportunity for the races. In Milton’s splendid phrase it is “ the mansion house of liberty,” spacious enough, free enough, strong enough for the working out of all God’s problems for the human race. Someone may say, “this is only a sentimental fancy, drawn from a false interpretation of an outgrown scripture. The facts are that causes purely economical and social send the immigrant to America. He comes to better himself. He comes to seek higher wages. He is ignorant, coarse and dirty. He breeds in the slums. He is a source of contagion, moral and physical. He is a peril in the industrial situation. He is an anarchist and a free-thinker, a menace to our free institutions. He should have been kept out of our country. He is here, but what we are to do with him ultimately seems a hopeless problem.”

In reply to such a pessimistic attitude I should say that it is true that the immigrant does come to better himself economically and socially, but God can and does use economic and social forces for the furtherance of his own plans. He can even make the wrath of man to praise him, and out of the horror of war, he accomplishes the long purposes of peace. The immigrant may come to America primarily to earn his bread at a better, wage, but in the hearts of thousands there is also a spiritual motive. There is a hunger and thirst for lberty, there is the desire for an opportunity not only to earn bread, but to obtain education, enlightenment, the chance to develop the soul as well as the body. We have been altogether wrong in our idea of the class of immigrants which the Old World has been sending us.

These men and women are not as a rule degenerate, any more than the Pilgrim Fathers were degenerate. The immigrant is never of degenerate stock; for it requires initiative and thrift and courage and faith to hear and to obey the call. God sifts the nations today as he sifted them of old to provide the seed for the planting of the original colonies. Neither are the races from which these people come degenerate. When we stop to think for a moment it requires more than American self-assurance to call Italy and Poland and those Slavic principalities whose feats at arms are amazing the world today, degenerate. We are receiving the descendants of men and women whose deathless deeds have shaped the history of the world, who have left us an imperishable heritage of literature and art and music. Who are we, and what have we done that we should sneer at those who come to us from the land of Homer and Socrates, from the country of Dante and Virgil, and Cesar and Michael Angelo? and from that suffering, sorrowful race without a country, a race which has given to the world the poetry of David and the prophecies of Isaiah, in whose mould was cast the features of him we call the Savior of the world. I think that we are beginning to see the folly of our pride and prejudice against the men and women who are coming to our shores, not seeking bread alone, but laden also with the unfulfilled dreams and visions of the centuries. The better spirit of America is speaking in lines like these from one of our younger poets:

“ Countrymen, bend and invoke Mercy for us blasphemers, For that we spat on the marvellous folk, Nations of darers and dreamers, Scions of singers and seers, Our peers and more than our peers; Rabble and refuse we name them And scum of the earth to shame them. Mercy for us of the few, young years, Of the culture so callow and crude, Of the hands so grasping and rude, The lips so ready with sneers At the sons of our ancient more than peers. Mercy for us who dare despise Men in whose loins our Homer lies, Mothers of men who shall bring to us The glory of Titian, the grandeur of Huss; Children in whose frail arms shall rest Prophets and singers and saints of the West.”

I want to ask you if it is not more than probable that the seed of the stock which produced in ancient times the glory and beauty and wonder of the world shall bloom again under the favoring conditions of a free land? It has been rendered unproductive, not infertile, by ages of oppression and ignorance and neglect. Shall it not flower again under our fostering

AND CIVIC PRIDE Q1 care, beneath the open skies of America? You and I, native born Americans must consider these things. We must have regard not for present conditions which are most deceptive, but for potentialities of power and service on the part of the immigrant in America. Let me quote at this point from that wonderful book, by that wonderful immigrant Mary Antin, who is herself the embodiment of all that is hopeful in this great problem. In speaking of the hardships of her father’s life during the perk years in America, she says:

“ His history for the period is the history of thousands who come to America like him, with pockets empty, hands untrained to the use of tools, minds cramped by centuries of repression in foreign lands. Dozens of these men pass under your eyes every day, my American friend, too absorbed in their honest affairs to notice the looks of suspicion which you cast at them, the repugnance with which you shrink at their touch. You see them shuffle from door to door with a basket of tools or buttons, or bending over the sizzling iron in a basement tailor shop, or moving a pushcart from curb to curb, at the command of the burly policeman. The Jew peddler, you say, and dismiss him from your premises and from your thoughts, never dreaming that the sordid drama of his days may have a moral which concerns you. What if the creature with the untidy beard carries in his bosom his citizen papers? What if the cross-legged tailor is support-

Q2 CIVIC RIGHTEOUSNESS ing a boy in college who is one day going to mend your state constitutions for you? What if the ragpicker’s daughters are hastening over the ocean to teach your children in the public schools? Think every time you pass the greasy alien in the street that he was born thousands of years before the oldest native American; and he may have something to communicate to you when you have learned a common language. Remember that in his very physiognomy is a cipher, the key it behooves you to search for most diligently.”

This is a challenge which we of America cannot ignore. The alien is here. What are you going to do about it? Are you going to hate him, fear him, neglect him, mock him, shun him? Or are you _ going to realize that he is a human being like yourself, with a history as proud as your own, with dreams and ideals in his breast, with a deep unsatisfied longing for education and opportunity, thirsty for the wells at which you have been privileged to drink deep? Are you going not simply to make a citizen of him, but are you going to try to make a useful and an intelligent citizen? Are you going to draw upon his hidden and undeveloped resources of power? Are you going to develop his peculiar and individual characteristics in harmony with the spirit of free institutions, in accordance with the genius of America? This is soul-stuff in the rough which God has sent us, just as good clay, so far as quality goes, as our own. We are to take it and mould it in accordance with the traditions of freedom and virtue and obedience and reverence and service which have been handed down to us from our fathers. How shall we do it? I have no doubt that every thoughtful person asks that question of himself over and over. ‘The gulf seems so wide to span, these people seem so far apart in our daily lives. No matter how good our intentions may be, there seems to be no possible method of influence and contact. Fortunately for us, providentially I believe, there are certain instruments of democracy which work automatically, without the necessity of personal initiative. The one great instrumentality which assimilates and Americanizes the foreign element is the public school. The immigrant who looks to the promised land from the bondage of oppression, idealizes America. In many respects his dream is destined to a rude awakening. He finds that he must still struggle for his daily bread in the fierce competition of our American cities. He finds that he must live in squalid surroundings. He receives scant courtesy and sympathy in his daily contact with life, but the public school never disappoints him. It stands for the opportunity for his children which he has missed. It treats every nationality alike, without fear and without favor: without money and without price it dispenses to the poorest that which is more precious than rubies. Let me quote again from Mary Antin:

“The public school has done its best for us foreigners and for the country when it has made us into good Americans. I am glad that it is mine to tell you how the miracle was wrought in one case. You should be glad to hear of it, you free-born Americans, for it is the story of the growth of your country: of the flocking of your brothers and sisters from the far ends of the earth to the flag you love, of the recruiting of your armies of workers, thinkers and leaders. As I read in school how the patriots planned the Revolution, and the women gave their sons in battle, it dawned on me gradually what was meant by my country. The people all desiring noble things, and striving for them together, defying their oppressors, giving their lives for each other — all this it was that made my country. It was not a thing that I understood: I could not go home and tell my sister about it as I told her the other things I learned in school. But I knew one who could say ‘my country’ and feel it, as one felt ‘God’ or myself. My teacher, my schoolmates, George Washington himself could not mean more than I when they said my country after I had once felt it. For the country was for all the citizens and I was a citizen. And when we stood up to sing ‘America’ I shouted the words with all my might. I was very earnest proclaiming to the world my love for my new found country. ‘I love thy rocks and rills, thy woods and templed hills.’ ”’

Not all the children of immigrants can express their feelings so eloquently as this, but in all the miracle is wrought. It is a miracle. Without even consciously striving for it the public school manages along with the teaching of the ordinary branches of knowledge, to perform a wonder greater than was ever claimed for the touchstone of the alchemist. It takes all these different nationalities gathered from the ends of the earth, and it makes them citizens, it gives them the consciousness of citizenship, it makes them glow with a patriotism which is often more intense than that of the native born. ‘The former president of Harvard University has made the complaint, that the public school does not do this work fast enough. On the contrary, it does it with surprising, miraculous speed. And this is the most important part of the service which it renders the state. I have often told public school teachers of my own church who are teaching the children of foreigners largely, that there is no work in the world short of that of the foreign missionary so important and significant for human welfare as theirs. J would emphasize that statement publicly. We want teachers who are well trained technically for their scholastic duties, but above and beyond that we want teachers with character, men and women who passionately love their country, for to them is entrusted the sacred duty of moulding the citizenship of the republic, to them must be left very largely the task of taking these diverse elements of life, and welding them into a cohesive, homogeneous people imbued with high ideals of knowledge, of righteousness, of patriotism.

Not far short of the public school, supplementing and codperating in the work and influence is the free public library. I never see the statue of the grim old Puritan, as he stands near our public library, with his book beneath his arm, looking down upon the groups of foreign children with their books beneath their arms, without a thrill of enthusiasm and hopefulness. For the Book, whether it be the Hebrew Scriptures or some other divinely inspired source of knowledge and faith, is the symbol of the unshackled mind, of enlightenment and freedom.

I realize that I have said very little about the personal or the religious approach in relation to the immigrant problem. Such approach requires great wisdom and tact and patience. There are many opportunities which may be sought out for expression of personal sympathy and courtesy, and fellowship with those of other races. These opportunities

AND CIVIC PRIDE — Q7 come unsought as we mingle together in the cosmopolitan life of the city. I believe that it is possible to supplement the service of our schools and libraries with evening meetings for social and educational purposes in our school houses. The saddest thing after all, about the situation is the hopelessness of the adult foreigner whose children will reach the goal, but who has come to America too late to receive the benefits of education, the fulfillment of his ideals and dreams. For him the country ought to devise some extensions of educational and social opportunities in connection with the school system. The opportunity of the church will come more slowly, but it will surely come. It will come in the same direction, along lines of personal interest and sympathy and friendship for our alien brethren.

But the most important thing it seems to me is this. After all, these people must work out their own destinies. We cannot be too paternal in our care. That is what they have come to our country to avoid. What they want above all things else is liberty of personal initiative, opportunity in its broadest and freest aspect. In the school and in the library we are giving them what they most desire. These institutions express our consciousness in spiritual terms. There is no taint here of commercialism, of self-interest. The city says to the immigrant: “‘ You seek work, bread, perhaps a fortune in America; well, that is a matter which you must work out for yourself. You seek also opportunity, you seek for room in which your souls may grow, you seek the fulfillment of your dreams and visions and ideals, and we open to you freely without discrimination, without price, the shining portals of knowledge. The generous hand of the city bestows this largess upon you all. Enter into your inheritance.” And we of the older America must stand back of this ideal. We must show by the character of our city itself how inestimably we prize our heritage. Our dream is of one country, a common, united people, strong in the determination to live nobly, to realize our ideals, to build here the new Jerusalem, the shining city of God.

““ New comers all, from the Eastern seas, Help us incarnate dreams like these; Forget and forgive that we did you wrong, Help us to father a nation, strong In the comradeship of our equal birth,

In the wealth of the richest bloods of earth.”’

III Civic Responsibility *

Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set upon a hill cannot be hid. Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your father which is in heaven.— Matthew 5: 14-16.

The conquest and development of a new continent requires the putting forth of those splendid individualistic qualities of heroism and self-assertion which are incarnated in the pioneer. The pioneer must act wholly upon his own initiative. He must be able to go out into the wilderness with his axe and his rifle and recreate civilization. He must possess courage, industry, patience, skill. He must have the genius of the inventor, he must be his own physician and priest, he must be undaunted by failure, the grim spectres of suffering, of hunger and cold must not terrify him. Within his breast there must be a dynamic force which pushes him on as the engines of the ocean liner force her against tide and current across the sea.

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So great have been the tasks accomplished by the pioneer in the building and preserving of the nation that his qualities have become embodied in the creed of American life. The American child is taught that he must have push, initiative, enterprise. He must “ get there,” in the vernacular of the street. By what route is immaterial so long as he “ arrives ” with a fortune. He must reach the top of the ladder no matter what becomes of those whom he pushes aside in his upward ascent. He is taught from the beginning, to cultivate and worship the Ego. No matter how many fail he must win. Within limitations these qualities are admirable. ‘The child should be taught to cultivate concentration, persistence, ambition. He should be taught to have faith in himself and high courage, to be undaunted by failure, to laugh at hardship and disaster. But there are certain very grave dangers to the republic which have already resulted and will continue to result from the over emphasis of these admirable characteristics.

The time comes when the nation passes beyond the pioneer stage. The roaring city with its myriad-spindled mills, its tides of traffic, its palaces and its hovels, rises on the river bank where the cabin stood lonely in the clearing. The descendant of the man who saw his neighbor only once in six months is pushed and jostled in the hurrying throng. The pioneer was a law unto himself. The citizen of the great city is only one to be considered among one hundred thousand. Each of the one hundred thousand has his own desires, his own needs, he is seeking his own ends, and each is entitled to equal consideration under the great law of democracy.

The partial failure of our civic life, and that carries with it the failure of democracy, has come largely from the fact that we have carried over the self-assertive, individualistic qualities of the pioneer into the complex life of our American communities. Each individual has been bent, with restless energy upon the development of his own life and his own fortune, careless of the fact that he owed any duty or responsibility whatever to the community in which he lived. So far as any real helpfulness or codperation is concerned many of our most successful business men might have been living in cabins in the wilderness or in old baronial castles of feudal days.

We are beginning to realize that this is not good citizenship. A person is not a good citizen today because he possesses the sterling virtues of the pioneer, because he hustles from morning until night, because he is shrewder, or stronger or more unscrupulous than his competitor. In the wilderness the strong arm, the keen eye and the finger quick upon the trigger, were the distinguishing marks of the successful man, the desirable citizen. You cannot carry over these qualities into the modern community ; or if you do, you will have a civilization which is brutal, coarse, corrupt, with anarchy and revolution looming through the red haze ahead. Social life constantly tends to become more complex. Labor is placed more and more upon the codperative basis. There must be a buyer as well as a seller and the rights of each must be protected. ‘The trained hand takes the place of the strong arm. Instead of the subjugation of the wilderness, the arts must be cultivated. Instead of the straining team and the straight furrow across the virgin prairie, there must be the development of literature and music and painting and architecture. The city is a vast organ with a thousand thousand pipes: it is a breathing body with a net work of interlacing sensitive nerves. Not with rough hand, not with brutal, elemental passions comes the master who will evoke harmony. ‘The true citizen of the modern city is he who forgets himself, in the larger life about him, who is sensitive to the city’s myriad moods and endless wants, its passions and its pain, to its marvellously complicated life which goes on beneath the stars at night and its pall of smoke by day.

The good citizen is he who loves the city with a passionate devotion, whose heart thrills with a sense of civic pride and a deepening sense of civic responsibility. Responsibility! That is the master word of the new citizenship. Here is this marvellously complex life which modern conditions have called into being. It is a living organism. It has a soul. Infinite possibilities of joy and sorrow, service and shame are hidden within its future. We have not yet begun to measure these forces or hardly to understand them. It may be that in the shadow lurks tragedy darker than ever Paris saw when her barricades ran red with the blood of revolution. Who shall direct these forces, who shall be responsible for the city? Who, if not her citizens, both men and women, and her educated citizens? Her men and women of training and resourcefulness and power! This sounds like a trite commonplace. But is it? As a matter of fact such men and women have attended to everything but the communal life. They have been busy with their own affairs, their own homes, their own business and professions and pleasures. There has been very little direct training for citizenship in our colleges. The individualistic standard of excellence has been constantly held up. Students have been urged to perfect themselves in scholarship, in culture, not that the communal life might be enriched, not that service might be rendered to the community, but that the individual life might be richer in knowledge and resourcefulness, and success attained in the chosen calling.

These students have gone forth with no true sense of social responsibility. In the striking words of Jesus, they have not “let their light shine before men.” But for what is the city? What is its true end and aim? Is it not, in the providence of God, the place where life shall be better and sweeter and richer and more abundant than elsewhere? Its functions of government, its schools and its libraries, its closely associated life, are not for selfish and utilitarian ends alone, but to lift men out of ignorance and darkness and bondage to the light of the high privilege of the sons of God. And I say that the humblest school teacher, working with alien children amid the squalid surroundings of the tenement district of a great city, working not simply for her daily bread, but with a holy enthusiasm for her calling, is deserving of a higher place upon the city’s roll of fame than the millionaire who draws everything in and gives nothing out.

The city will not develop its own higher life. It will not conduct its own affairs, any more than a great mercantile business will conduct itself. Such affairs demand the expenditure of energy and time, and the sacrifice of personal inclination. If our best citizens have not sufficient patriotism to attend to these matters themselves, if they turn them over to the ignorant, the corrupt, the alien, they must expect, themselves, to suffer. We must realize that more and more the forces of ignorance and vice are massing in the city. The good citizen, the educated citizen will have to fight, if he expects to conquer these forces. He must bring all the trained resources at his command to bear upon the situation. He cannot buy good government in the market. He cannot contract for civic righteousness. ‘These and other blessings can come only as we give our own illuminated individualities that the light of truth and honor may shine, and the city may find its redeemed life. There is no other way. This is the sacrifice of self which the city demands. Not the old proud independence and. self-assertion, but the humble recognition of the fact that in the city life is bound up with life in vital relationships which cannot be denied. The pestilence which stalks through the city at noonday and beckons with ghostly hand at the door of the palace as well as the hovel: — you are responsible for it, oh men and women of wealth and leisure, of the great cities of the earth, because you have not made the slum, the breeding place of plague, impossible! It is because of your denial of the law of responsibility, because you have not considered your brother as well as yourself. You must give yourselves. Go into the ancient cities of the world and read on the monuments of bronze and marble how men have given of themselves in the years that are gone; how the giving of personality is inseparably connected with worth and progress and achievement in the city’s life. London and Leyden, Calais, Geneva, Venice, Florence, Rome. You cannot think of the proud cities of the earth without thinking of prouder names, from the humble burgher, to Savonarola in his shroud of flame, who have given of themselves, whose very blood has cemented the stones which make the foundation of the city’s worth.