Old World Traits Transplanted
Chapter 9: Reconciliation of the Heritages
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IMMIGRATION in the form it has taken in America differs from all previous movements of population. Populous countries have planted colonies, states have been conquered and occupied, slaves have been imported. But when a single country is peacefully invaded by millions of men from scores of other countries, when there are added to one American city as many Jews as there are Danes in Denmark, and to the same city more Italians than there are Italians in Rome, we have something new in history.
Naturally the mass and quality of this immigration is important to us because it cannot fail to have an influence on our whole system of life. Every country must have an organization for securing order and efficiency, not only to insure the happiness and prosperity of its citizens within its boundaries, but also to protect it from foreign attack., The various nationalities and
( 260) civilizations of the world are in a state of rivalry, and a low efficiency in any country may lead to its destruction, actual or economic. Our wish to assimilate the immigrants who remain here means that we want to make them a practical part of our organization.
There is an interesting parallel between the influence which a country wishes to exercise over its members and the influence of what geographers and naturalists call an "area of characterization." In the natural world an area of characterization is a geographical region sufficiently marked in its physical features to put a characteristic imprint on its flora and fauna. In the same way, the human inhabitants of a country develop a body of characteristic values. A country is an area of cultural characterization.
REQUIRED IN A DEMOCRACY
Among the distinguishing features of the American "area of characterization" is the principle that no man is to be used as a tool and thus placed in the category of purely material values, and we have consequently repudiated the ancient conception of the state, in which by a system of "ordering and forbidding" great things were achieved,
( 261) indeed, but only by keeping the masses permanently in the category of things.
Our state system is based on the participation of every member and assumes in all the wish and ability to participate; for in the last analysis we mean by democracy participation by all, both practically and imaginatively, in the common life of the community. Our democracy is not working perfectly at present because not even the native born are participating completely. Our old order was a territorial one. The autonomy of the political and social groups was based on size and geographical isolation. So long as the group remained small and isolated, individuals were able to act responsibly, because the situations they dealt with came easily within their understanding and capacity. But the free communication provided by the locomotive, the post, the telegraph, the press, has dissolved distances. As a result men find themselves in a system of relationships, political and economic, over which, in spite of their traditional liberties of speech and action, they no longer have control. The conditions of their daily living are vitally affected by events occurring without their knowledge, thousands of miles away.
It is similarly impossible for average
( 262) citizens to grasp all the elements of the. political issues on which they give decisions. The economic nexus holds them in an inevitable interdependence; they are politically disfranchised while retaining the ceremony of a vote. No longer able to act intelligently or responsibly, they act upon vagrant impulses. They are directed by suggestion and advertising. This is the meaning of social unrest. It is the sign of a baffled wish to participate. It represents energy, and the problem is to use it constructively. While we are forming a new definition of the situation, we are subject to emotional states and random movements.
The founders of America defined the future state as a democracy characterized by the largest possible amount of individual freedom, but this ideal has not been fully realized. At best we can say that we are in the process of giving this country the cultural characterization of such a democracy.
While we have on our hands this problem we are importing large numbers of aliens, representing various types, in the main below our cultural level. Some of them bring a greater and more violent unrest than we know here: psychoses acquired under conditions where violence was the only means of political participation. Others belong
( 263) to the nationalistic, opportunistic, or in fewer numbers to the radical elements, who not only do not regard this country as their country, but do not regard it as a country at all—do not recognize that we have a characteristic body of values and the right to preserve these values.
The immigrant usually brings a value which is very important to us—labor—and it would be possible to regard him in a narrowly practical way as a merely material value, just as the negro in slavery and Chinese labor in earlier days were regarded as material values, and 'as the Germans regarded the 600,000 laborers from Austria and Russia who crossed their borders annually and returned to their homes at the end of the harvest season. But we know from our experience with slavery and from the German experiences with the Sachsengänger, that this attitude has a bad effect both on the aliens and on the culture of the group which receives and uses them as mere things. If visitors are disorderly, unsanitary, or ignorant, the group which incorporates them, even temporarily, will not escape the bad effects of this.
Every country has a certain amount of culturally undeveloped material. We have it, for instance, in the Negroes and Indians,
( 264) the Southern mountaineers, the Mexicans and Spanish-Americans, and the slums. There is a limit, however, to the amount of material of this kind that a country can incorporate without losing the character of its culture. For example, the "three R's" represent our minimum of cultural equipment, and we are able to transmit , this much to practically everybody. With this equipment the individual is able to penetrate any sphere of life; without it, he cannot move upward at all. But if we should receive, say, a million Congo blacks and a million Chinese coolies annually, and if they should propagate faster than the white Americans, it is certain that our educational system would break down; we could not impart even the "three R's." We should then be in a state of chaos unless we abandoned the idea of democracy and secured efficiency by reverting to the "ordering and forbidding " type of state.
This is the general significance of immigration to our problem of democracy. We must make the immigrants a working part in our system of life, ideal and political, as well as economic, or lose the character of our culture. Self-preservation makes this necessary; the fact that they bring valuable additions to our culture makes it desirable.
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Now we can assimilate the immigrants only if their attitudes and values, their ideas on the conduct of life, are brought into harmony with our own. They cannot be intelligent citizens unless they "get the hang" of American ways of thinking as well as of doing. How fast and how well this is accomplished depends (1) on the degree of similarity between their attitudes and values and our own, giving them a certain preadaptation to our scheme of life and an ability to aid' in their own Americanization; and (2) on how we treat them—our attitude toward their heritages. These are, roughly, the elements in our problem. of assimilation.
SIMILARITY OF HERITAGES
It is one of the ordinary experiences of social intercourse that words and things do not have the same meanings with different people, in different periods of time, in different parts of a country—that is, in general, in different contexts. The same "thing" has a different meaning for the naïve person and the sophisticated person, for the child. and the philosopher. The new experience derives its significance from the character and interpretation of previous experiences. To the peasant a comet, a plague, an epileptic
( 266) person, may mean, respectively, a divine portent, a visitation of God, a possession by the devil; to the scientist they mean something quite different. The word slavery had a connotation in the ancient world very different from the one it bears to-day. It has a different significance to-day in the Southern and Northern states. "Socialism" has a very different significance to the immigrant from the Russian pale living on the "East Side" of New York City, to the citizen on Riverside Drive, and to the native American in the hills of Georgia.
The meaning any word has for an individual depends on his past experience, not only with the thing the word means, but with many other things associated with it in his mind. For example, the concept evoked in his mind by the word "food" is determined not only by the kinds of food he has eaten, but also by the normal state of his appetite and digestion, the ease or difficulty with which he secures his daily ration, whether he grows, hunts, or buys it, whether or not he prepares it, whether he has ever been near starvation, and so forth. No two people have exactly the same experience by which to define the same word, and sometimes the resulting difference in meaning is immeasurably great. This is
( 267) the meaning of the saying of the logicians that persons who attach different meanings to the same words add the same things are in different "universes of discourse, "—that is, do not talk in the same world.
All the meanings of past experience retained in the memory of the individual form what is called by psychologists the "apperception mass." It is the body of memories with which every new item of experience comes in contact, to which it is related, and in connection with which it gets its meaning. The difference in the interpretation of words is merely an example of the fact that persons whose apperception masses are radically different give a different interpretation to all experience. The ecclesiastic, the artist; the mystic, the scientist; the Philistine, the Bohemian—are examples of classes not always mutually intelligible. Similarly, different races and nationalities, as wholes, represent different apperception masses and consequently different universes of discourse, and are not mutually intelligible. Even our forefathers are with difficulty intelligible to us, though always more intelligible than the eastern European immigrant, be-cause of the continuity of our tradition.
The set of attitudes and values, which we call the immigrant's heritage, are the
( 268) expression in ideas and action of his apperception mass. "Heritages" differ because the races and nationalities concerned have developed different apperception masses; and they have developed different apperception masses because, owing to historical circumstances, they have defined the situation in different ways. (See Chapter II.)
Certain prominent personalities, schools of thought, bodies of doctrine, historical events, have helped to define the situation and determine the attitudes and values of our various immigrant groups in characteristic ways in their home countries. To the Sicilian, for example, marital infidelity means conventionally the stiletto; to the American, the divorce court. These differences some-times go so far that it is impossible for those concerned to talk to one another. The Western World, for ' example, appreciates learning, and we have signalized this in our schools. The Jews also show this appreciation (documents 1-3), and even the Polish peasant, in document 4, p. 7, appreciates learning, though not for his class. But in document 5, p. 8, we have a complete repudiation of learning; the situation is here defined in terms of piety, somewhat as we defined it before Darwin. We can imagine that if the Oriental who
( 269) signs this document met a Western entomologist at dinner, and, interrogating him as to his interests, found that he spent his life in examining potato bugs, moving them from one temperature to another, from one degree of humidity to another, from one altitude to another, to see if their spots changed, and if they changed whether the change remained permanent under all conditions, or whether new generations reverted to the previous type if removed to the old conditions—in other words, that he was trying to create a new species—the Oriental would conclude that his interlocutor was not only impious, but insane.
If the immigrant possesses already an apperception mass corresponding in some degree to our own, his participation in our life will, of course, follow more easily. While we have given in Chapter I and elsewhere examples of heritages strange to us, the body of material presented shows that he does not differ from us profoundly. We can best appreciate the immigrants' mental kinship with ourselves negatively, by comparing them with what they are not. If the immigrants practiced and defended cannibalism and incest; if they burned their widows and killed their parents and broke the necks of their wayward daughters, cus-
( 270) -tomarily; if (as in a North African Arab tribe) a girl were not eligible for marriage until she had given her older brother a child born out of wedlock, to be reared as a slave; if immigrant families limited their children by law to one boy and one girl, killing the others (as in the Ellice Archipelago) ; or (as in the Solomon Islands) if they killed all, or nearly all, their children and bought others from their neighbors, as our farmers sell young calves to butchers and buy yearlings; if immigrant army recruits declined target practice because the bullet would go straight anyway if Allah willed it —then the problem of assimilation would be immensely complicated.
In comparison with these examples immigrant heritages usually differ but slightly from ours, probably not more than ours differ from those of our more conservative grandfathers. Slavery, dueling, burning of witches, contempt of soil analysis, condemnation of the view that plants and animals have been developed slowly, not suddenly created, are comparatively recent American values and attitudes.
PSYCHOLOGY OF ASSIMILATION
It is evidently necessary that the people who compose a community and participate
( 271) in common enterprises shall have a body of common memories sufficient to enable them to understand one another. This is particularly true in a democracy, where it is intended that the public institution should be responsive to public opinion. There can be no public opinion unless the persons who compose the public are able to live and think in the same world. The process of assimilation involves the development in the immigrant and the native of similar apperception masses. To this end it is desirable that the immigrants should not only speak the language of the country, but also know something of the history of the people among whom they have chosen to dwell. For the same reason it is import-ant that native Americans should know the history and social life of the countries from which the immigrants come.
It is important also that every individual should share as fully as possible a fund of knowledge, experience, sentiments, and ideals' common to the whole community, and him-self contribute to that fund. It is for this reason that we maintain and seek to maintain freedom of speech and free schools. The function of literature, including poetry, romance, and the newspaper, is to enable all to share vicariously the inner life of each.
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The function of science is to gather up, classify, digest, and preserve, in a form in which they may be available to the community as a whole, the ideas, inventions, and technical experience of the individuals composing it. Not merely the possession of a common language, but the widest extension of the opportunities for education, is a condition of Americanization.
For the immigrant to achieve an apperception mass in common with the American community, involves the development of new attitudes on his part, and his old experiences are the only possible foundation for the new structure. If a person becomes interested in anything whatever, it is because there is already in him something to which it can appeal. Visitors to the Dresden Gallery are all affected by the Sistine Madonna in approximately the same way because they bring to it a similar body of socially created appreciations—the sanctity of motherhood, the sufferings of out Lord, the adoration of Mary, the aesthetic appreciation of female beauty, and so forth. No amount of explanation or persuasion would arouse the same feeling in an African black man. Livingstone relates that an African mother brought to him through the dust and heat a child pitiably misshapen
( 273) through rupture. Two native men uncovered the basket and were moved, not to pity, but to laughter. These Africans evidently would not appreciate the painting of a Madonna because they have not developed our tenderness toward children, because white men and women impress them some-what as cadavers and albinos impress us,[1] because they have not our tradition of chivalry and know nothing of the sufferings of our Lord.
A certain identity of experiences and memories between immigrants and Americans is of main importance for assimilation, because, in the process of learning, a new fact has a meaning and makes an appeal only if it is identified with some previous experience, something that is already known and felt. Thus, when we appealed to the patriotism of our immigrants during the war, we found a ready response, because they knew what patriotism is. The Bohemians in a Cleveland parade carried a banner with the inscription : "We are Americans through and through by the spirit of our nation," and interpreted this by another banner: "Americans, do not be discouraged. We have been fighting these tyrants for three
( 274) hundred years." And in the following letter a Slovenian boy participates in American life on the basis of old-country attitudes:
158. DEAR BROTHER: . . . I received the civil clothes sent me from Cleveland, and at the same time a thought occurred to me which has never left` me—that I should feel ashamed to leave the army and go back to civil life. I do, indeed, love my young healthy life, I long to be free again, going on my own ways, without hearing the command of another, but, alas! Am I justified in thinking of my own liberty and happy life when the moment is here that calls on every young man to bring liberty to others? Away, you selfish thoughts! On into the battle! I am a Slovene myself, and my fathers and grand-fathers never had any opportunity to fight for liberty. Indeed, they fought for hundreds of years under the command of Hapsburgs to continue slavery and tyranny. . . . Goodbye, my beloved young life, I shall not return to my happy home until the day has come when I can proudly see the liberated Jugoslavia in a liberated world. Then I shall return, conscious that I have done my bit. If I shall perish—I am afraid I shall let it be so. The only thing I am sorry about is that I don't possess hundreds of lives, giving them all for liberty.
Dear brother, the suit of clothes you sent me, I sold to-day for thirty dollars, to a man who thinks less than I do [2]
This process of making warm and personal something that would otherwise remain cold,
( 275) extraneous, irrelevant, and foreign, by identifying it with a body of sentiments that is already intimate and warm, is illustrated in more detail by the case of the Italian boy whose first disillusionment in America is referred to in document 34, p. 46.
159. I go about the streets to find the great history, to feel the great emotion for all that is noble in America. I do not see how the people can think to compare the American city with the beauty of Rome, or Venice, or Naples. Even in big city like New York I do not find much monuments to the great deeds, to the great heroes, and the great artists. I was deeply surprised not to find the fountains. I do not find the great art to compare with the art of Italy....But one day I see very, very big building. My mind is struck. With all I have seen in Italy, in Rome, in Venice, in Genoa, in Milano, in Florence, in Naples—I have never seen anything like that! I say, "There is the thing American. It is a giant!"
When I went to night school, I had a good impression to me. The teacher treat every one just the same. The Jew just the same the Chinaman, and . the Chinaman just the same the Italian. This was a wonderful impression. When I saw the principal of the school, he look to me like Italian nobleman, the way he hold his eyeglasses. I went to this school just because I like the principal. He give it to me welcome like I was an American. I learn little English, and about the American government, and how the people can make change and progress by legislation without the force of revolution, and I
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like very much this idea. The teacher told me why not to become an American? .. .
I have good impression to become an American. But I do not become American because I think always of the grandeur of the Italy civilization of the past! . . . [Then I fall in love and] . I do not wish at all to go back to Italy. I think to take a wife. A man must situate himself. I think about many things, but I think especially about the future. Everything begin to look different. I have not think much about the future before, I have think about the past. Maybe I have a son, it is the future that is for him. America is to be his country. What is the past? It is gone. The future is to come, and I think that when my son shall live I wish it to be some great time. For the future I cannot see so much Italy as America. The grandeur of the Italian cities, Venice, Genoa, Florence, Naples, held Italy in the world's highest place for nearly one thousand years. But the world continue. It go on. Now comes the great day for America, the great financial, the great mercantile power, and I think with that the great science, the great art, the great letters. Why to live always in the memory of past grandeur? They were only men. I am a man, and my son will be a man. Why not live to be somebody ourselves, in a nation more great than any nation before, and my son perhaps the greatest of any great man?
And I see that big work to build the future. I see the necessity to learn the English, to become the citizen, to take part in the political life, to work to create the better understanding between the races that they come to love each another, to work for better conditions in industry, for health and safety and prosperity, to work for the progress in science,
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for the better government, and for the higher morality —and it become more pleasure to work than to take the leisure. Suddenly it looks to me like that is the American, that is what the American is always to do, always to work for the achievement. It come to me, like I am born—I am American! [3]
In this case a new experience makes an appeal because it is identified with a wish. The Italian boy specifies that he wishes a wife, child, home, but more generally he wishes success, and he identifies this with the American principle of "achievement."
Most frequently the appreciation of America begins in connection with a wish or a general ideal which was not attainable in the old country, but is attainable here. In document 160 the writer realizes that America is a country where everybody can get an education :
160. The strongest reason for my preference of America to other countries is perhaps my appreciation of education and its opportunities. This is probably explained by my previous experience as a worker in the educational field in the old country—Russia. After graduating from a teachers' college at Petrograd I served as director of a pedagogical class in Esthonia during three years, from 1897 to 1900. As my views upon education conflicted with those of higher "Russianizing" authorities, I chose to leave the teaching field and entered a university, to study law and political economy.
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The children in the public schools in Esthonia had to study everything except religion in Russian. They had to study Russian (Slavic) history instead of that of their own country and people. A good deal of time was given to lessons in religion and the singing of church hymns. But the saddest thing of all was that the children going through public school learned nothing or very little of the rudiments of the sciences. For adults there were no facilities for learning. The people forming private classes were pursued and in many instances arrested and fined.
Later I went to Germany and other West European countries and found that though public schools there gave some knowledge to the children, their individuality was suppressed by a system of discipline and punishment, and by being forced to learn rather by memorizing than by understanding, and rather by compulsion than by their own love for learning.
America is not only a "melting pot" for races but also a testing ground or laboratory for ideas, original American as well as imported European. Here they are compared in practical application, through which the degrees of their vitality can be determined. This makes America an interesting country in which to learn—to learn through observation and experience and through amply provided educational institutions and facilities, from the evening schools to the great universities, from various expositions to libraries. I know no other country where opportunities for learning by everybody are so rich as here.
The immigrants arriving on American shores soon find out that they need to learn, and first of all to learn the American methods of their prospective trades if they are going to make good in the New World. Formerly many of them were discouraged
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by not knowing or not finding opportunities for learning here. But nowadays they are, as it were, discovering these opportunities. For this reason I believe that the immigrants in the future will come here not only for higher earnings, but also for the sake of learning, desiring industrial training as well as general education.
The appreciation of America as a wonderful country in which to learn dawned upon me after years of wanderings, study, and observation here and in Europe, and as a result of comparing this country with the European countries, within the limitations of my personal experience.
My field study and observations led me to the conclusion that in the public school programs and methods in America and in European countries there is a still more pronounced difference than in the field of higher education. In Europe the main emphasis is laid upon form, authority, obedience, discipline, while in the American public schools freedom of action, imagination, initiative, and self-reliance are pursued as the main goal in the training of youth. The European public school suppresses individuality, while the American builds it up, or at least leaves it untrammeled.[4]
The identification of immigrant groups with America takes place on the psychological basis shown in the preceding documents. Points of contact are found in the respective apperception masses, where interests merge, and as a result of the increased community of interests other contacts are
( 280) made progressively. Assimilation may be compared with skin grafting, where the new tissue is not applied to the whole surface, but spots are grafted, and from these the connecting tissues ramify.
TOLERANCE VS. SUPPRESSION
The apperception mass of the immigrant, expressed in the attitudes and values he brings with him from his old life, is the material from which he must build his Americanism. It is also the material we must work with, if we would aid this process. Our tools may be in part American customs and institutions, but the substance we seek to mold into new forms is the product of other centuries in other lands. In education it is valuable to let the child, as far as possible, make his own discoveries and follow his own interests. He should have the opportunity of seeking new experiences which have a meaning for him when connected with his old experiences. A wise policy of assimilation, like a wise educational policy, does not seek to destroy the attitudes and memories that are there, but to build on them.
There is a current opinion in America, of the "ordering and forbidding" type,
( 281) demanding from the immigrant a quick and complete Americanization through the suppression and repudiation of all the signs that distinguish him from us.[5] Those who have this view wish the repudiation to be what the church fathers demanded of a confession of sin—"sudden, complete, and bitter."
It is notable that this destruction of memories is the plan of both those who demand a quick and complete Americanization and those who demand a quick and complete social revolution — the extreme Americanists and the extreme radicals. In the anarchist-communist manifesto (document 76, p. 100) we read : "We must mercilessly destroy. . . . We must take care that everything is wiped out from the earth that is a reminder." Both positions imply that there is nothing of value for the future in the whole of past experience; whereas we have shown, in speaking of the psychology of assimilation (particularly in the case of the Italian boy) that "reminders" are precisely what the individual uses in
( 282) making constructive changes in his life; and in the chapter on demoralization we pointed out that the absence of reminders, forget-fulness of the standards of the community, failure to live in the light of the past, reduce a man to the basis of the instincts, with which humanity first began. How badly the mere instincts work is exemplified in document 56, p. 72.
There is an element of pure prejudice in this theory of Americanization. It appears as intolerance of the more obvious signs of unlikeness. Where color exists, it is the mark specially singled out by prejudice, but since our immigrants are mainly not colored, language becomes the most concrete sign of unlikeness and the foremost object of animosity. It is certainly true that a man cannot participate fully in our life without our language, and that its acquisition is rightly considered a sign and rough index of Americanization. But the American who does not know the details of the immigrant's life and problems cannot imagine how useful his language is here in the first stages. Take an actual case. The Danes are distinguished farmers, but here the soil, the demand, are unfamiliar and they have trouble. The American government could help them, but they do not know this. Even if they did
( 283) they could not inquire in English; they would not know whether to address the President or the Senate; and they would not address either because they would not know with what honorific form to begin the letter. A certain Danish editor invites communications on specific plans and troubles of this kind. In each case (and the number is relatively large) he sends with his reply a letter in English, addressed to the Department of Agriculture, asking for the proper bulletin. The Dane is to copy the letter and send it. This much he will do, and the bulletin somehow gets read. Here again is the typical process of assimilation—the identification of the immigrant's success with America; here, too, is an example of what we mean when we say that the immigrants must assist in their own Americanization. Prejudice against language thus means bringing into disrepute one of the tools most useful in assimilation.
Again, the Yiddish language is a very useful heritage to the Jew, and this is a clear case of utility, without any obstinacy or sentimentality. The Jews associate their nationalism with Hebrew, the language of the Jews and the one that their national idealists are seeking to restore. Yiddish is a German dialect, with a mixture of
( 284) Hebrew, Polish, and so forth, developed originally by the Jews as a business expedient. It is an uncouth speech, with very limited power of literary expression, and nothing with which a man would seek to identify himself. The Jews in America drop it as soon as possible, and it is really difficult to induce a Jew to speak a few words of it in order to show you what it is like. And yet the Jewish community in New York City pays annually more than $2,000,000 for Yiddish newspapers. These newspapers and other Jewish institutions do thousands of particular and very personal services for Jews which American institutions could not do and which no one could undertake with-out the use of Yiddish. Language is a tool which its possessor cannot afford to throw away until he has another.
Quite aside from the question of utility, immigrants, especially the older ones, cherish the memories of their former home, and wish to preserve some signs identifying them with their past. This is a natural sentiment. It is frankly expressed in the following documents from groups which have no nationalistic psychoses and represent the settler type:
161. In a news item in Skandinaven, the editor of the Lutheran Herald . . . is quoted as saying .. with reference to the Norwegian flag, that in this
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country it did not belong anywhere outside of the dictionary and the Norwegian legation headquarters in Washington.. .
No flag except the American has a place as a national emblem in the heart of any good citizen. But how is it that we have here the flags of all the nations of the earth? During the war, when the country surely required the loyalty of every citizen as never before, there were foreign flags around us wherever we went. The English flag, the French, the Belgian, the Italian—they were to be seen every-where. They were used at patriotic and other meetings; people displayed buttons with these flags on them, and it was very common to see automobiles decorated in this way. . . . No one feared enemy purposes from the nations these flags represent. The same can with even greater truth be said about Norway. In the first place, Norway's relatively small military strength makes this thought untenable. Also that country's pronounced peace policy puts the idea out of the question; also its later historical traditions. Norway is one of the few nations which have managed a decisive national crisis without resorting to war. .
When the Norwegian flag is seen here the object of its display is to celebrate the intellectual and spiritual values which Norway has achieved. In the same way we honor the important intellectual and spiritual revivals and achievements in all nations. If this had not been permitted, the Rev. Mr. Lee or any other American would not have a bible to teach from.
But when people of Norwegian extraction in this country hold fast to their Norwegian cultural heritages, then it is because a people who have lived
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together in the same country through centuries must have given birth to spiritual and intellectual values which are peculiar to such a people. ...[6]
162. . . . The small Danish society of which I am the secretary has a membership of only twenty-eight, and while in regard to American ideas these men are as loyal as if they were born Americans—and this is the case with the immigrated Danes as a general rule—yet I cannot say that our society does much to Americanize its members. At their meetings they speak their mother tongue and sing their old country songs, looking upon one another almost as members of the same family, and their object is to help each other in case of necessity, especially, of course, in case of sickness.. .
When the different Liberty loans were floated I found all of us personally deeply interested and buying to our capacity, and at my initiative our little society bought $500 worth of bonds, practically using all the cash money we had in the treasury; I, personally, managed out of my $35 per week job to buy bonds to the value of $600.[7]
Any fine fund of personal feeling is valuable in identifying the present with the past in the life of the immigrant, but aside from this these sentimental memories should command respect, and we should let them remain unmolested in the region of personal life. We should know by this time that under tolerance, peculiar group values—such as language and religion—are only means to
( 287) a fuller life; under oppression, they become objects of life.
IMMIGRANT ORGANIZATIONS VALUABLE
Following the instinctive prejudice against strangeness, many Americans distrust immigrant organizations, as such, and consider them obstacles to assimilation. On the contrary, we have emphasized throughout this study the importance of these organizations. Indeed, the amount of immigration which we can continue to tolerate or encourage depends- on their character.
Organizations, beginning in the family and community, are the means by which men regulate their lives. The healthy life of a society always depends more on the spontaneous organization of its members than on formal legal and political regulations. It is only in an organized group—in the home, the neighborhood, the trade union, the co-operative society—where he is a power and an influence, in some region where he has status and represents something, that man can maintain a stable personality. There is only one kind of neighborhood having no representative citizen—the slum; a world where men cease to be persons because they represent nothing. In the slum men live
( 288) in an enforced intimacy, but they do not communicate. They suspect one another and keep away from one another. They cannot maintain a personality because there are no standards; if standards of decency, morality, and sanitation exist they are imposed from without. A slum is a place, composed at first of the poor, which has become inevitably a refuge for criminals and disorderly persons—a place of missions and lost souls.
If the face - to -face organization which made the immigrant moral at home is suddenly dissolved in this country, we have the general situation presented in the documents on demoralization in Chapter IV. We saw there that men, removed from the restraining influence of an organized community, tend to follow their immediate impulses and behave in monstrous ways. Ethnologists have shown that when the uncivilized races come into contact with the products of our civilization they appropriate the vices and ornaments, the whisky and beads, and leave the more substantial values. The same tendency appears among immigrants, especially the children. The term "Americanization" is not used popularly among the immigrants as we use it. They call a badly demoralized boy "completely
( 289) Americanized." Thomas and Znaniecki have presented a large mass of materials on the demoralization of the Poles in America, and they conclude that the "wild" behavior found in this group is to be explained by the fact that "the individual does not feel himself backed in his dealings with the outside world by any strong social group of his own, and is not conscious of being a member of a steadily organized society.... This does not, of course, apply to the relatively intelligent and sociably responsible immigrants who take an active part in the construction of Polish institutions and have an economic ideal which gives stability to their lives. [It characterizes] ; that floating unorganized mass of the intellectually backward immigrant population which constitutes among the Poles from one-fourth to one-third of the total number."[8]
The organization of the immigrant community is necessary as a regulative measure. Any type of organization which succeeds in regulating the lives of its members is beneficial. If you can induce a man to belong to something, to co-operate with any group whatever, where something is expected of him, where he has responsibility, dignity, recognition, economic security, you have
( 290) at least regulated his life. From this stand-point even the nationalistic societies do more to promote assimilation than to retard it. There is no doubt, for example, that the nationalistic newspapers do not want their readers to become Americanized, but they make them more intelligent, more prepared to be Americans, simply by printing the news of what is going on in America, and this they have to do in order to circulate at all. The nationalistic organizations are the means by which certain men make their living and get their distinction; they assist the home countries materially in their struggle for freedom, they stimulate some older people to return to Europe, but they-have almost no effect in keeping the immigrant, especially the young generation, estranged from American life:
163. In spite of the continual use of patriotic Polish slogans by all local groups, Poland is for the great majority of the Poles mainly the object of an almost purely aesthetic interest, whose motive power is very small as compared with the many and complex practical interests connected with the immediate social environment. . . . Even before the great war Polish patriotism was not a vital matter with the great mass of American Poles .[9]
164. It is a very painful admission, but we cannot fail to recognize that our language has suffered and
(291) is suffering constant and lamentable losses... . Children born in this country, and consequently American citizens by birth, have produced a third generation of a totally different mentality from the I first.... [It is true that] some intelligent individuals who had in childhood no opportunity to secure a French education, and little opportunity to speak French, have applied themselves to the study of the French language, forcing themselves to practice it and to show themselves truly patriotic. But these are people of heart and character who appreciate all that is noble in the race from which they are issued and who were unwilling to be simply Americans.[10]
The propaganda of hate carried on notably by the Italian press, and described by an Italian in the note below,[11] is also partly
( 292) nationalistic in its aim. While not among the dependent nationalities, Italy has been particularly active in preserving the allegiance of her emigrated subjects, and her leaders have acted, so to speak, as representatives of a country that is trying to control a colony. They have used hate, because enmity is the motive through which men can be aroused and controlled most easily. But here also, if we recognize the fact that editors are playing on attitudes that are already there, not creating them, the propaganda has slight importance. Italians who returned to Sicily after the war, are now returning to America. They found that it was "too small" over there. They had entered their own country as immigrants, and suffered again the disillusionment of the immigrant. The fault to be found with the nationalistic organizations is not that they do the damage they imagine they are doing, but that they fail to do the constructive work of which, as organizations, they are capable; that they do not help their people to identify their success with America, in such ways as we have exemplified above in the case of the Danes and Jews.
We have not developed American institutions adapted to meeting the first needs of
( 293) the immigrant and preserving in him the good qualities which he brings. Usually he reaches our institutions only after he has become a failure. The immigrant organizations are doing very positive services for. their members by maintaining their sense of social responsibility, of responsibility to some type of community. We have seen examples of it in this chapter and in the chapter on "Types of Community Influence." But more than this, our experience has shown that, while it is possible for an individual immigrant, especially if he represents a relatively cultured type, to identify himself directly with American society with-out an intermediate connection with a group of his own nationality, in the main the immigrants are becoming Americanized en masse, by whole blocks, precisely through their own organizations. The organization as a whole is influenced, modified, Americanized by its efforts to adjust itself to American conditions. This happened, for example, when the immigrant athletic organizations recently joined the American Amateur Athletic Association; for this alliance implies acceptance by the immigrant of all the American athletic standards. Similarly, the immigrant who penetrates American society as a member of
( 294) an immigrant group forms a bond between this group and American society. The Letts in New York City felt pride in a young violinist who had played at their weekly entertainments. For his further development the Lettish organization sent him to the American teacher, Damrosch, The individual thus forms a link between the immigrant society and American society. He will transmit the influence of his American contacts to the immigrant organization.
We illustrated in Chapter II the important fact that the immigrant is not a highly individualized person. He has been accustomed to live in a small, intimate, face-to-face group, and his conduct has been determined by - this group. Naturally he needs the assistance of such a group for a time in America, and naturally this group is composed of his own people. This general condition explains the perfect success of our government in its appeal to the immigrant population for subscriptions to the Liberty loans. The appeal was not made to the immigrant individually, but through his organizations.
The type of organization which the immigrants bring with them from home (see Chapter II) is one which we ought to appreciate. It represents the individual's respon-
( 295) -sibility to society which we have in a measure lost, and are consciously attempting to restore by the reorganization of the local community. It is a type of organization which can be made the basis of all kinds of co-operative enterprise—the basis, in fact, on which the local community will again function. Co-operation is an attitude already present in immigrant consciousness, and co-operative economic enterprises are arising spontaneously among immigrant groups—the Finns, the Italians, the Poles, and others. This is especially true since younger men of immigrant parentage, who have gone through our schools, who are American in feeling, are beginning to assume the leadership in the immigrant groups and to employ constructively the traditional' spirit of co-operation.
If we wish to help the immigrant to get' a grip on American life, to understand its conditions, and find his own role in it, we must seize on everything in his old life which will serve either to interpret the new or to hold him steady while he is getting adjusted. The language through which his compatriots can give him their garnered experience, the "societies" which make him feel "at hoarse," the symbols of his home land, reminding him of the moral standards under which he
( 296) grew up. Common courtesy and kindness exact tolerance for these things, and commonsense indicates that they are the foundation of the readjustment we seek.
PERPETUATION OF GROUPS IMPOSSIBLE
The evident value of these immigrant organizations during the period of adjustment raises another question. Is he to remain permanently in one of these racial organizations, and are they to continue as centers of cultures diverse from and competing with that of America? This question touches a larger aspect of the heritages, relating to the ideal character of our national life—whether we shall strive for a uniform or a diversified type of culture and whether the perpetuation of immigrant traits and organizations will accomplish this diversity.
We have recognized the importance of a resemblance between the members of a community which will enable them to under-stand and influence one another. In a peasant community, as in a herd or flock, great unanimity in following tested habits is sufficient, without any great intelligence, to enable all to live. But as communities progress the members behave more and more independently, use more freedom.
( 297) Communities progress, indeed, because certain of their members insist on using more freedom.
The civilization we have is the product of an association of individuals who are widely unlike, and with the progress of civilization the divergence in individual human types has been and must continue to be constantly multiplied. Our progress in the arts and sciences and in the creation of values in general has been dependent on specialists whose distinctive worth was precisely their divergence from other individuals. It is even evident that we have been able to use productively persons who in a savage or peasant society would have been classed as insane—who were, perhaps, insane. Until recently our conception of insanity has been to some extent determined by the standards of the "primary group," which demands uniformity in its members. Many persons who had the qualities of genius have simply passed as queer in their local communities. Julius Robert Mayer, the discoverer of the law of the conservation of energy, was twice confined in insane asylums by the people of the provincial town of Heilbronn. Where else did a man belong who went about arguing that "heat was a mode of motion," that if a house burned
( 298) down it was not destroyed? Indeed, he considered himself insane in his home town, and when the physicist During wished to visit him he declined to receive him in Heilbronn, but arranged to meet him in the neighboring village of Wildbad. "Since everybody here," he wrote, "considers me a fool, everybody considers himself justified in exercising a spiritual guardianship over me." [12] We have already pointed out that the Mohammedan could regard a modern scientist as insane. However, we have had so many profitable returns from the queer behavior of such men as Mayer, Darwin, and Langley (whose experiments with the flying machine were regarded by many as insane), that we have changed our definition of insanity and regard any man as sane the sum of whose activities is valuable to the community.[13]
The value of the principle of diversity has already been fully recognized in the scientific world and in the specialized occupations. Efficiency in these fields is based on far-going individualization of function. The astronomer or the physiological chemist
( 299) awaits the result of the physicist or the chemist as condition of further steps in his own investigation. The more diversified the personalities, the more particularized the products of these personalities, the greater the likelihood that we shall find among them the elements for the realization of our own plans, the construction of our own values.
In the civilization having the highest efficiency all are not in the same "universe of discourse," but there tend to be smaller groups or circles who understand one another and co-operate. Although they are not understood by everybody, their products become useful to everybody. The physicists, for example, represent such a circle. The physicist demonstrates a law which the public cannot understand; but the engineer understands it and applies it in the invention of machines which become of general use.
Now representatives of the different immigrant groups claim a similar social value —that, on account of their racial peculiarities and the fact that they have developed by their past experiences different apperception masses, they are predisposed to individualized functions as groups, and that by permanently organizing along the lines of their aptitudes they will not only
( 300) express their peculiar genius, but contribute unique values to America:
165. Democracy rejected the proposal of the superman who should rise through sacrifice of the many. It insists that the full development of each individual is not only a right, but a duty to society; and that our best hope for civilization lies not in uniformity, but in wide differentiation.
The movements of the last century have proved that whole peoples have individuality no less marked than that of the single person; that the individuality of a people is irrepressible and that the misnamed internationalism which seeks the obliteration of nationalities or peoples is unattainable. The new nationalism proclaims that each race or people, like each individual, has a right and duty to develop, and that only through such differentiated development will high civilization be attained. Not until these principles of nationalism, like those of democracy, are generally accepted, will liberty be fully attained, and minorities be secure in their rights.[14]
166. In contradistinction to fusion is the attitude which deals with the entire problem of Jewish life as the problem of a community, which wishes to preserve the integrity of its group life. Those who hold this attitude believe that the continued conservation of those values which are worth while in Jewish life can but work for the enrichment of the character of the American Jew, and must therefore redound to the benefit of America. They contend that America will accomplish its destiny to the fullest only if it will permit complete social expression on
(301)
the part of all the people which come to its shores, provided, of course, such expression is co-operative and does not militate against the common good.. . In his political and civic life, therefore, the individual must necessarily have a single affiliation. But it is possible for one individual to know many languages, to be acquainted with many literatures, and to be imbued with the ideals of many groups. Democracy not only permits such multiple spiritual affiliations, but encourages them to the utmost.[15]
167. The ethnic groups are justified in organizing among themselves for the perpetuation of what they consider to be of significance for their heritage, providing that by so doing they do not preclude the influence of what the state considers to be of significance to its own heritage. The adjustment of the individual born within an ethnic group to the total life must rightly be made through the co-operative work of the public and the ethnic schools .[16]
This position would seem very secure only if the groups represented in immigration were specialized by heredity, so that some of them could do certain things that others could not do, or do them better—if some of them were poetical, some philosophical, some born physicists. But it is not apparent that even the most distinct races, the black, white, and yellow, are characterized in this way. The anthropologists think that if
(302)
such differences exist they are not very great. Certainly the Japanese have shown that in general they can do anything that we can do, and have not shown that they can do anything that we cannot do. It is easier to explain why the Jew is in the needle trades, is not a farmer, and is intelligent, on the ground of circumstances—that he `has had a given racial history—than on the ground of inborn aptitudes.
In any case, so far as European immigration is concerned, we do not have to do with races at all in the proper sense. The "races of Europe are all mongrel, and are classified on the basis of language and custom. The Magyars, for example, came . in from Asia only a thousand years ago, but they are so interbred with Germans, Ruthenians, Slovaks, Rumanians, Serbians, Croatians, that it is difficult to find an example of the original Magyar type. The Prussians were not originally Germans at all, but a Baltic tribe, akin to the. Lithuanians. Even the Jews are greatly intermixed with both Asiaties and Europeans. Twenty per cent of the Jews are blond.[17]
We have referred in Chapter VI to the fact that the peasant does not greatly fear death for himself, but is terrified by a pest or war,
( 303) where the existence of his group is threatened. Men fear extinction, not only for themselves, but for their groups. We do not wish to have our families die out; we cannot think calmly of the white race as dying out; we do not wish to have even the birds and the flowers die out. We wish only our enemies to die out. The thought of a given group being swallowed up by another group leaves the apprehension of death in the minds of its members. The dread of the death of their communities is the instinctive basis of the wish of the immigrant groups to remain separate in America. The rational and practical basis of the wish is the claim that they will in that way have more security, recognition, and efficiency.
We see no objection to an immigrant group remaining perpetually in America as immigrant group or as racial element on the basis claimed by the Jews in documents 165-167, if it is able to do so. Certainly our opposition would fan the wish to a flame, as, on the contrary, laws compelling immigrants to remain in such groups would arouse their fanatical resistance. But since we must ascribe the peculiarities of these groups to a long train of common experiences, not to inborn and ineradicable traits, there are apparently only three grounds on the
(304) basis of one or more of which an immigrant group could remain culturally separate for an indefinite time: (1) the ability to perpetuate in the new generations the traditional memories of the group without loss; (2) the ability to create values superior to those of America, and the maintenance of separation in order not to sink to the cultural level of America; or (3) an ineradicable prejudice on one or both sides.
(1) Actually, individuals and groups cling to their memories only so long as
they are practically or sentimentally useful. The efficiency of the newer
immigrants depends on their not forgetting, and on contact with their own past,
as is illustrated in the following document, which was sent from America to
Norway, and advises against certain radical changes in the Norwegian language.
168. The Norwegians in America are and intend to remain Americans. They do not consider them-selves colonists in a foreign land. They regard this country, as their own. They have helped to build large sections of it. Here their children are born and here they will remain. But a supply of cultural values from the old country will strengthen them individually and collectively and make them even better citizens than they already are....Norwegian-Americans will continue for many years to need cultural supply from the mother country.
( 305)
The need will continue until our people have become so far assimilated that they can supply their own cultural requirements from American sources. But that will take a long time, because, while the pioneers, or those who are left of them, and their descendants are thoroughly Americanized, there are still hundreds of thousands of people of the first generation who are not yet in touch with American cultural sources and therefore depend upon Norway for their supply through the medium of their own language,
. The continued cultural connection between Norway and the Norwegian-Americans ought, in my judgment, to be built up on a solid language foundation. If the language be lost we may be absolutely sure that cultural supply from Norway will cease.[18]
We know however, that the grandchildren of Norwegian immigrants have become practically indistinguishable from other Americans and that Norway has for them, at most, only a poetic value. All immigrant groups are losing, even too completely and rapidly, their languages, which would be the chief sign and instrument of their separate identity.
(2) There are frequent cases where a people of superior culture remains indefinitely separate in a culturally inferior group. The English in India and the Saxons in Transylvania have remained separate for centuries. But no immigrant group here can claim so great a diversity of values as
( 306) is produced by America as a whole, and to the degree that an immigrant group is separated from American life, voluntarily or by geographical isolation, it will be pauperized in even the culture which it brings. The document last quoted expresses this fear. No existing state or nation, and certainly no nation within a nation, can create alone the values necessary to a high degree of efficiency. In a world characterized by individualization of function, values must be secured from wherever they exist in the whole world.
(3) The question of prejudice and discrimination may be put aside as not serious enough in America to affect the persistence of immigrant groups. The Jews have felt it, but in general the Jew is losing the marks of his identity as fast as possible, and to the degree that he does this the prejudice disappears. "To the degree that racial minorities are not secure in their rights" (as Justice Brandeis puts it), the separateness will continue.
The present immigrant organizations represent a separateness of the immigrant groups, from America, but these organizations exist' precisely because they enable the immigrants to overcome this separateness. They are signs, not of the perpetuation of immigrant
( 307) groups here, but of their assimilation. We know no type of immigrant organization which is able to live without some feature related to the needs of the immigrant in America. The success of the nationalistic societies is based on such features as insurance. In addition they provide entertainment and recognition, which represent universal needs. On the other hand, American organizations for the immigrant interest him only to the degree that they understand and supply his needs as immigrant.
We have recorded the wish of the Italian editor (document 147, p. 227) that the Italians would organize as do the Jews. From his standpoint this meant a gain to be made at the expense of the Americans, for the sake of "what constitutes a gain for our race over the Anglo-Saxon race." From our standpoint, the Jewish community is serving the Jew by enabling him to identify his interests with America. Because Jewish organizations make the Jew efficient they prepare him to use all the American institutions. If you open a school for immigrants it is filled with Jews; if you open a school for immigrant women it is filled with Jewish women. Some Americans are disquieted by the persistence of immigrant organizations even in groups of long-standing in this
( 308) country. But they disregard the continual intake of recruits from the old country who need the support and schooling of their fellow countrymen, and the fact that these organizations are constantly graduating their members into general American life.
Assimilation is thus as inevitable as it is desirable; it is impossible for the immigrants we receive to remain permanently in separate groups. Through point after point of contact, as they find situations in America intelligible to them in the light of old knowledge and experience, they identify them-selves with us. We can delay or hasten this development. We cannot stop it. If we give the immigrants a favorable milieu, if we tolerate their strangeness during their period of adjustment, if we give them freedom to make their own connections between old and new experiences, if we help them to find points of contact, then we hasten their assimilation.. This is a process of growth as against the "ordering and forbidding" policy and the demand that the assimilation of the immigrant shall be "sudden, complete, and bitter." And this is the completely democratic process, for we cannot have a political democracy unless we have a social democracy also.
THE END
