Americans by choice

Front matter

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Foreword

This volume is the result of studies in methods of Americanization prepared through funds furnished by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. It arose out of the fact that constant applications were being made to the Corporation for contributions to the work of numerous agencies engaged in various forms of social activity intended to extend among the people of the United States the knowledge of their government and their obligations to it. The trustees felt that a study which should set forth, not theories of social betterment, but a description of the methods of the various agencies engaged in such work, would be of distinct value to the cause itself and to the public.

The outcome of the study is contained in eleven volumes on the following subjects: Schooling of the Immigrant; The Press; Adjustment of Homes and Family Life; Legal Protection and Correction; Health Standards and Care; Naturalization and Political Life; Industrial and Economic Amalgamation; Treatment of Immigrant Heritages; Neighborhood Agencies and Organization; Rural Developments; and Summary. The entire study has been carried out imder the general direction of Mr. Allen T. Bums. Each volume appears in the

vii

FOREWORD

name of the author who had immediate charge of the particular field it is intended to cover.

Upon the invitation of the Carnegie Corporation a committee consisting of the late Theodore Roosevelt, Prof. John Graham Brooks, Dr. John M. Glenn, and Mr. John A. Voll has acted in an advisory capacity to the director. An editorial committee consisting of Dr. Talcott Williams, Dr. Raymond B. Fosdick, and Dr. Edwin F. Gay has read and criticized the manuscripts. To both of these committees the trustees of the Carnegie Corporation* are much indebted.

The purpose of the report is to give as clear a notion as possible of the methods of the agencies actually at work in this field and not to propose theories for dealing with the complicated questions involved.

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Table Of Contents

Publisher's Note v

Foreword vii

Table of Contents ix

Introduction

It would require a very long list of names to give specific mention of all those who have rendered substantial aid in gathering the information on which this volume is based. The Commissioner of Naturalization, Mr. Richard K. Campbell; the former Director of Citizenship, Mr. Raymond F. Crist, and the chief examiners under their direction, have done all in their power to afford information and other assistance. Several hundred judges of naturalization courts in all parts of the country, took pains to answer our questionnaire and personal letters on special questions. Students of immigration and naturalization problems have been ungrudging in their co-operation.

The tedious and painstaking work of compiling the information contained in more than 26,000 petitions for naturalization, analyzed in the statistical chapters of this book, was done more especially under the direction of Professor Raymond Moley, then at Western Reserve University, Cleveland; Homell Hart, of Cincinnati; Professor S. C. Kohs, of Reed College, for Portland, Or^on; Professor T. T. Waterman, of the University of the state of Washington, for Seattle, and Professor L. H. Hawkins, of Clark University, for Worcester, Mass. Aside from the service of these volunteer assistants, thanks are due in more than perfunctory manner to the members of the staff of the Americanization Study who devoted long hours to this exacting task.

xxiii

INTRODUCTION

Professor Moley compiled most of the material used in the chapter on the legal aspects of citizenship, and afforded information of the utmost value woven into other parts of this volume.

The thanks of the author are due in particular to his personal associates in the work, Mr. Paul Lee Ellerbe, formerly Chief Naturalization Examiner at Denver, and Miss EHzabeth Miner King, then of the staff of the New York Evening Post, now Mrs. Harold Phelps Stokes, of Washington, D. C.

John Palmer Gavit

XXIV

I

From the point of view of citizenship there are two kinds of Americans — those who are American involuntarily by birth, and those who are American by choice.

This book devotes itself to those who have become Americans not by birth, but of their own free will and accord, by that process of voluntarily adopting a fatherland known as Naturalization. It endeavors to tell generally what happens to them in that process, and something of what they do and contribute to our political life after they have been admitted to active membership in our body politic.

The subject is one much talked about — especially since the beginning of the World War — and little understood save by those who administer, or who in some way profit by, the operation, the shortcomings, and confusions of the existing law and the system which has grown up under it. That system is handicapped and beclouded by public indifference and by the survival of ancient attitudes and limitations, and bedeviled by the theories and prejudices of persons and interests who, innocently or willfully — often with impeccable intentions — stand in the way of progress or adhere for various reasons to ideas and methods long since outgrown, or in the light of to-day actively mischievous.

THESE ARE OUR VOTERS !

It is a current fashion of unthinking persons, contemplating the seething masses of immigrants congested in our cities and in certain rural sections, beholding the polyglot store signs and newspapers, sensing the existence of languages, manners, and customs unfamiliar and perhaps grotesque and even outrageous to their own habits and ideas of propriety, and reflecting vaguely upon the real and supposed evils of our political methods and machinery, to exclaim:

"And these are the people who corrupt our politics! These are the voters who elect our presidents!"

Many who should know better indulge in such absurdities, and even cite statistics to support them. A characteristic manner of reasoning would read something like this:

"In 1910 there were 13,000,000 foreign-born persons in the United States, and only a little more than 3,000,000 of them were naturalized!"

Leaving the unreflecting hearer to forget that of the 13,000,000 only about half (6,646,817) were males of twenty-one years and over; that more than half a million (570,772) had declared their intention to become citizens; that there was no report as to the citizenship of more than 775,000; so that the alien population of voting age, and of the then voting sex, known to be unnaturalized, was only about one-sixth of the total foreign born, or 2,266,535. This was bad enough in all conscience, and the Woman-Suffrage Amendment to the Constitution of the United States certainly has aggravated it, since through it married immigrant women were made possible voters through the naturalization of their husbands. But nothing can be gained by exaggerating the facts, or constructing mare's nests by inferences from false assumptions. It is worth while to examine the conditions, to observe the extent to which the foreign born actually do participate in our political processes, and on the basis of such facts as are available, to judge the effect that foreign birth does tend to have upon the quality of that participation.

There is no disposition here to overlook or minimize the menace to our social and civic life involved in the presence of vast masses of undigested, unassimilated population of whatever race or kind — even of oiu* own people, herded in colonies, dominating large communities, illiterate as regards our history and ideals, ignorant of our language, traditions, and customs. It constitutes a social problem of great magnitude and intricacy — though probably by no means so menacing as it is our fashion to believe. But it is not one directly affecting our political life or the operation of our political machinery to any such degree as it is the custom to declaim. There is little substantial evidence in these days that the foreign-born voter, as such, is a source of corruption or other evil influence in our politics.

PRIMITIVE ATTITUDES TOWARD IMMIGRANTS

Whether it is called an instinct, native in animal psychology, or an inheritance of mental habit and tradition handed down from remote times of family and tribal necessity, the fact is that we all regard the stranger with a suspicion, diminishing perhaps as we broaden with years, experience, and culture, but never entirely lost. Exceedingly few are those great souls who have no trace of it. Especially if the stranger wears a differently colored skin, expresses his thought by unfamiliar vocal sounds and inflections, practices customs of clothing, eating, marriage, religion, different from our own; lives in houses of peculiar shape and use — these things all partake, for the average person, of the outrageous and the dangerous, and usually subtly offend those habits of group taste which we somehow feel to have their roots in essential morality and the nature of things.

From time immemorial, all states and communities have laid special disabilities and limitations upon the alien — all based ultimately upon this habitual suspicion of those who belong to another tribe or clan. As Edwin M. Borchard says : ^

The legal position of the alien has in the progress of time advanced from that of complete outlawry, in the days of early Rome and the Germanic tribes, to that of practical assimilation with nationals, at the present time. In the Twelve Tables of Rome, the alien and enemy were classed together, the word "hostis" being used interchangeably to designate both. Only the Roman citizen had rights recognized in law. . . . The Germanic tribes, in the early period, were hardly more hospitable to the alien than were the Twelve Tables of the Romans.

With the extension of trade and travel, and especially with the upgrowth of the feudal system, however, the utihty of intercourse with peaceable strangers, and the advantage of adding their personal prowess, capacity, and assets to the resources of the commimity, came to be more and more recognized, and the stranger within the gates was accorded an increasing measure of tolerance, not to say welcome. But this tolerance was at best of a very limited character; practically, it was not much more than a rigid systematizing of the

* Edwin M. Borchard, The Diplomatic Protection of Citizens Abroad, p. 33 et seq.

ways of making the immigrant useful and contributory. It is not the province of this report to dilate upon this branch of the subject. Suffice it to say that to this day, over nearly the whole earth, the alien is still subject to marked hmitations, and that the exploitation of him is neither a modern nor an American invention.

As for political rights, let alone any degree of participation in the functions of government, no nation ever has contemplated the possibility of such a thing — until a few of the American states, clamoring for population from any corner of humanity, offered virtually full political participation to the alien immediately upon his mere declaration of intention to apply for citizenship — some day! Until the excitement of the World War brought public attention to the whole question of the position and influence of the foreign born in America, this anomaly remained in force in at least a dozen states: Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Texas, and Oregon. Since then it has been abolished by constitutional amendment or other legislation in all but two — ^Arkansas and Missouri.^

LEGAL POSITION OF THE ALIEN

Thus far, from the point of view of international law and custom, it has been left to each nation to regu-

1 Letters from Attorneys-General of Arkansas and Missouri, as late as October, 1921, state that no change has been made. The Attorney- General of Alabama points out that a careful reading of the state constitution "discloses that only foreigners who had declared their intention of becoming citizens prior to the adoption of the constitution of 1901 were entitled to register and vote, and that such person lost this right if he did not become a citizen at the time that he was entitled to become such under the laws of the United States." 2 5 late the privileges of, and the restrictions upon, the alien, with the exception that certain nations strong enough to enforce it have established in certain countries held by them to be less than fully "civilized," the principle of extra-territoriality, by virtue of which their nationals must be tried before special tribunals supervised by representatives of their own nation. Generally speaking, and subject to the rule that aliens of all races must be treated alike under processes of law, a nation may deprive the ahen of liberty of action, may prohibit or restrict his ownership of property, may forbid or delimit his employment in certain kinds of work or enterprises, and may expel and deport him, at its pleasure. In other words, the status and rights of an alien are determined almost absolutely by the municipal law in the country in which he is domiciled. The only Hmitations upon this power are those established by treaties, and by the general spread of humane ideas, and the growing feeling — discouraged, perhaps, but by no means halted, by the World War — of the solidarity of the human race.

In the United States, the rights of the alien include personal protection, protection of property already acquired, and the use of all means of redress and judicial protection enjoyed by citizens.^

The alien's plight in this country has been complicated by the peculiar relation subsisting between the Federal government and that of the individual states. For it has frequently happened that the government of the United States has been practically unable to enforce the rights of aliens created by treaty when traversed by state law. On more than one occasion

^ This is subject, of course, to the universal exceptions regarding alien enemies in time of war; also to such other exceptions as special statutes in certain states regarding the holding of real property and other matters.

threatening diplomatic situations have been created by the existence of this condition.

This ancient feeling toward the alien, and the treatment, legal, extra-legal, and illegal, to which he has been subjected in respect of his person, his family, and his property, undoubtedly have affected substantially his sentiments toward this country. Disillusionment about the atmosphere and ways of the "Land of the Free" is responsible for om' loss of the citizenship of many desirable immigrants. The man who will not submit quietly to injustice is of the material of which our best citizens from the beginning have been made. The kind of aliens who can accept without resentment some of the things to which those of foreign birth and speech have been subjected within our borders during very recent times, are not fit to be Americans! ^

WHAT IS AN "American".?

We are concerned just now, however, with the alien, not in his general legal or social relations, but as material for active membership in our community as an American citizen, as a voting participant in the sovereignty held in this country by the people. As such, he comes to a position unique in all the world. It is not yet true — ^perhaps it will be very long before it can be true — that there is absolutely no bar to any person on account of race; for the law and its interpretations exclude from citizenship Chinese, Japanese, and certain people of India not regarded as "white" — although the blacks of Africa are expressly admitted. Nevertheless it may be said broadly that, regardless of race, the immigrant can come to America and win his

^ See Kate Holladay Claghorn, The Immigranfs Day in Court {in

preparation) .

way upon his own merits into the fellowship of what all the world calls "Americans."

Now, what is "an American"? 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." He never describes it — it is exceedingly difficult to learn what may be meant by the phrase. This is not strange, for there is no such thing if a racial type is meant. There never has been any such thing.

Perhaps we know what the expression might mean in New England — a combination of English, Scotch, or W^elsh, who in turn would be bred of Dane, Pict, and Scot, Saxon and Norman and Kelt, with perhaps a strain of French, or maybe of Dutch. In Pennsylvania very likely it would be English Quaker — or Plattdeutsch. The French-Spanish combination in the Gulf region, the Scandinavian or German in the Middle West and Northwest, the Spanish- Mexican along the Rio Grande and in southern California, and so on, are "American" by a title as good as that of those who trace their descent from the Pilgrim Fathers.

John Graham Brooks^ remarks that "our piebald millions" are now so interwoven with all that we are "that to silhouette the American becomes yearly more baffling." Says he:

The early writers have no such misgivings. ... In 1889 I met a German correspondent who had been four times to the United States. ... He said he brought back from his first journey a clearly conceived image of the American. He was

1 John Graham Brooks, As Others See Us, 1909.

** sharp-visaged, nervous, lank, and restless." After the second trip this group of adjectives was abandoned. He saw so many people who were not lank or nervous; so many were rotund and leisurely, that he rearranged his classification, but still with confidence. After a third trip he insisted that he could still describe our countrymen, but not by external signs. He was driven to express them in terms of character. The American was resourceful, inventive, and supreme in the pursuit of material ends. *'My fourth trip," he said, "has knocked out the final attempt with the others. I have thrown them all over like a lot of rubbish. I don't know what the American is, and I don't believe anyone else knows."

Prof. Franklin H. Giddings, in an informal address at Columbia University, undertook, albeit somewhat casually, to point out the characteristics which should mark a good American. He must be loyal, must "play the game"; must have a local pride not only in the quality of his country but in his home community, feeling and exemplifying a moral and civic responsibility for the betterment of conditions actuated by a wise and constructive idealism. Recognizing, no doubt, in the very saying of this, that these things would mark the good citizen of any nation, he protested that after all was said, and despite the difficulty of precise definition, there was something distinctive, perceptible, and, in fact, perceived by the discerning; real, however subtle and elusive, distinguishing the true American from all other folk — "a certain sensitiveness to the finer values of life; an admiration for these things."

Well, certainly the ideal American is, and has, and does all of this; certainly all Americans ought to be, and have, and do all of it ! But in all candor and fairness it must be acknowledged that it would be invidious and altogether insupportable to claim it or any of it as in any proper sense racially distinctive of America.

THE AMERICAN HAS NO RACIAL MARKS

We cannot isolate any physical characteristics; we cannot segregate any particular racial descent; one may search in vain for any definable hereditary mental or spiritual characteristic that will fit or typify all, or even many, of the "piebald millions" who inhabit and vote, attain success and honor, and, at need, enlist or be conscripted for war, in the varied jurisdictions of our tremendous stretch of territory between the ancient French-Canadian colonies of Maine and the Philippines; between the Virgin Islands and Alaska. 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!

If, then, we can distinguish "the American" neither by any physical attribute of race nor by adherence to political forms and formulae, what is there left for us to conserve and to boast about — ^as our very own?

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, 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. Whether we like it or not, this is the fact. We are not a race, in any ethnic sense. At most, we are in the very early stages of becoming one.

Prof. Ulysses G. Weatherly, of Indiana University, said : ^

Every great historical race is a composite of originally separate elements merged into a unity whose ruling characteristic is an increasing integration of culture rather than of blood. This process of merging is believed by Gumplowicz to constitute the very essence of world history.

And he quotes Gumplowicz, in Der Rassencampfy to this effect:

Throughout the whole history of men stretches a continuous process of amalgamation which, beginning with the smallest primitive synthetic groups and following a racebuilding law to us unknown, binds together and amalgamates small, heterogenous groups into even larger unities, into peoples, races, and nations, perpetually bringing them into conflict against other similarly constituted and amalgamated peoples, nations, and races, and through this conflict into ever new fields of conquest and culture, which again consolidates and amalgamates the heterogenous elements.

The American people has been and is being made by exactly this process. We are in the midst of the making of the "American." It does not yet appear what he shall be, but one thing is certain, he is not to be of any particular racial type now distinguishable. Saxon, Teuton, and Kelt, Latin and Slav — ^to say nothing of any appreciable contribution by yellow and brown races as yet negligible in this aspect of the

^ Proceedings of the American Sociological Society, vol. v, p. 57, etc., paper on "The Racial Element in Social Assimilation."

question — each of the races that we now know on this soil will have its share of "ancestorial" responsibility for the "typical American" that is to be.

NOT RACIAL, BUT CULTURAL

Leaving for the long future, then, the evolution of the hereditary type, is there so soon something "home grown," some "integration of culture," that is peculiarly our own? Every American knows in his heart that however subtle and elusive, however difficult of definition, there is something real that distinguishes "America."

In the attempt to fix the boundaries for the new Poland, the Peace Conference sought in vain for some limits of language or of political unity on which to base their demarcation. It came down at last to a simple question :

"Do you want to he Poles? ^*

And the question was enough.

Who doubts the answer to the question: Do you want to he American? There is something more than love of home, something higher than the Hking of a cat for the warm place under the familiar stove, that stirs the heart of every normal American when he sees the Stars and Stripes. The alien who declares it his intention to become a citizen of the United States may not be able to put it in words, but he means, and he knows that he means, something real and vital, recognizes a substantial distinction, when he says that he wants to he an American!

There must be, there is, there has been always, in

the midst of the racial chaos which to-day constitutes

I>erhaps our greatest social problem, something that

may be called nationally even if not yet racially

American; something indigenous on this soil as on no other. It belongs to us. Up to a time beginning a quarter of a century ago, when the so-called "new immigration" from southeastern Europe and southern Russia set in in full flood, and now anew in the experiences of the World War, it was and has again become, a thing shared by all of our racial groups and elements — ^peculiarly American. It answers the test set forth by Professor Weatherly in the paper already quoted, of the completion of the nationalizing process: "... when the things of the spirit are held in common and cherished by all, even if some specific ethnic or linguistic differences siu'vive." Or, in the words which he attributes to Renan:

To have a common glory in the past, a common will in the present; to have done great things together, to desire to do still greater — these are the essential conditions for being a People.

Professor Weatherly repeatedly emphasizes the great point — that "it is not sufficient that peoples should merely have undergone similar experiences" in order to be knit into a nation; "they must have undergone them together. ^^ Most of the great modern nations, as he says, have passed through the same processes of social change, "but in actual adjustment to such change each has had its own separate career."

Twenty-five years ago it was true that the term "American" meant one who, of whatever racial descent, represented something very definite, of tradition, experience, and achievement — ^and of promise, too — "a common glory in the past, a common will in the present"; "great things done together, and a desire to do still greater"; unity determined not by external facts alone, but by sentiment.

Now, dimly as we yet realize it, it is true again.

A baptism of blood and suffering, of sacrifice and selfdenial, and of common experience in a vast world emergency, and out of it a vision of better understanding and a great work before us to be done, have gone far to restore that unity of appreciation of "great things done together'^ and of will to do still greater which was our common glory — and was getting lost. We had, we have now, a right to be both proud and jealous of the heritage left us by our fathers of many races, and now watered by the blood of our own generation, and to look with concern, if not with dismay, upon what might portend a swallowing up of this moral, this sentimental unity, in a great inundation of newcomers, who, however well intending as individuals, have not shared our tradition and experience, and who seem not to have been fitted by any experience of their own to assimilate either the tradition of our past or our aspiration for the future.

ESSENTIALS OP " 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. For of America alone it may be said:

That however lamely and insufficiently we have lived up to it, our country is traditionally the refuge for the oppressed of every land.

That here the individual has found a fuller •freedom

to seek his happiness in his own way. More than any

other nation, America has never recognized a political autocracy, has reckoned Man above every consideration of property, class, or dynasty.

That here only has the individual male from the beginning been deemed the ultimate political unit — "one man, one vote." The country-wide adoption of Woman Suffrage extends this concept to include women.

That however crudely we have practiced it, we have aspired to estimate essential justice and the common sense of right relationship — fair play between man and man — as the final standard and appeal of human conduct, over against every claim of precedent and authority.

That from the outset of this nation, the distinguishing spirit of America has been a protest against Militarism and the domination of the professional soldier, against compulsory military service in time of peace. Our army and navy, always thought of as instrumentalities of last resort, reserved almost wholly for defense against aggression from without, have on principle been always under the control and direction of civilians as such, and in peace time have been recruited by voluntary enlistment. This one fact of freedom from military conscription has been the distinction of America which, more than any pother thing, has attracted Europeans to our fellowship. They have fought for us and with us, but always with the American motive, embodied in the final great fact, which is America's alone:

That when we have gone to war, our civilians armed and fighting with the devotion, courage, and effectiveness inspired only by the sense of a righteous cause, it has always been for liberty. At the beginning, in 1776, and again in 1812, we fought England to free ourselves. In 1845, despite the motive of the Slave Power to extend the area of slavery, so far as the motive of the people in general was concerned we were fighting Mexico to free our fellows in Texas. In 1861 we fought a great civil war to maintain our free Union and to liberate the negro slaves. In 1898 we fought Spain to free the Cubans, and notwithstanding this, our sole sin of imperialism, in the long run we shall have freed also the Filipinos. In 1917 we participated, no doubt decisively, in the struggle to free Europe from the threat of domination by the military autocracy of Germany. "To make the world safe for democracy" — that was the appeal which brought the hearts of the American people into the war. Of no other great nation can it be said that it never went to war excerpt for liberty.