Читать книгу Modern American Prose Selections - Various - Страница 8

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You have been in conference for the past three days, and I have greatly regretted that I could not be with you. You have been gathered together as crusaders in a great cause. You are the missionaries in a new movement. You represent millions of people in the United States who to-night believe that there is no other question of such importance before the American people as the solidifying and strengthening of true American sentiment.

I understand that your conference has been a success; and it has been a success because, unlike some other conferences, it was made up of experts who knew what they were talking about. But you know no one can give the final answer upon the question of Americanization. You may study methods, but you find yourselves foiled because there is no one method--no standardized method that can always be used to deal correctly and truly with any human problem. Bergson, the French philosopher, was here a year or two ago, and he made a suggestion to me that seemed very profound when he said that the theory of evolution could carry on as to species until it came to deal with man, and then you had to deal with each individual man upon the theory that he was a species by himself. And I think there is more than superficial significance to that. It may go to the very heart and center of what we call spirituality. It may be because of that very fact the individual is a soul by himself; and it is for that reason that there must be avenues opened into men's hearts that can not be standardized.

Man is a great moated, walled castle, with doors by the dozens, doors by the score, leading into him--but most of us keep our doors closed. It is difficult for people to gain access to us; but there are some doors that are open to the generality of mankind; and as those who are seeking to know our fellow man and to reach him, it is our place to find what those doors are and how those doors can be opened.

One of those doors might be labeled "our love for our children." That is a door common to all. Another door might be labeled "our love for a piece of land." Another door might be labeled "our common hatred of injustice." Another door might be labeled "the need for human sympathy." Another door might be labeled "fear of suffering." And another door might be labeled "the hope that we all have in our hearts that this world will turn into a better one."

Through some one of those doors every man can be reached; at least, if not every man, certainly the great mass of mankind. They are not to be reached through interest alone; they are not to be reached through mind; they are reached through instincts and impulses and through tendencies; and there is some word, some act that you or I can do or say that will get inside of that strange, strange man and reveal him to himself and reveal him to us and make him of use to the world.

We want to reach, through one of those doors, every man in the United States who does not sympathize with us in a supreme allegiance to our country. You would be amused to see some of the letters that come to me, asking almost peremptorily what methods should be adopted by which men and women can be Americanized, as if there were some one particular prescription that could be given; as if you could roll up the sleeve of a man and give him a hypodermic of some solution that would, by some strange alchemy, transform him into a good American citizen; as if you could take him water, and in it make a mixture--one part the ability to read and write and speak the English language; then another part, the Declaration of Independence; one part, the Constitution of the United States; one part, a love for apple pie; one part, a desire and a willingness to wear American shoes; and another part, a pride in using American plumbing; and take all those together and grind them up, and have a solution which you could put into a man's veins and by those superficialities, transform him into a man who loves America. No such thing can be done. We know it can not be done, because we know those who read and write and speak the language and they do not have that feeling. We know that we regard one who takes his glass of milk and his apple pie for lunch as presumably a good American. We know that there is virtue in the American bath. We know that there are principles enunciated in the Declaration of Independence and in the Constitution of the United States which are necessary to get into one's system before he can thoroughly understand the United States; and there are some who have those principles as a standard for their lives, who yet have never heard of the Declaration of Independence or of the Constitution of the United States. You can not make Americans that way. You have got to make them by calling upon the fine things that are within them, and by dealing with them in sympathy; by appreciating what they have to offer us, and by revealing to them what we have to offer them. And that brings to mind the thought that this work must be a human work--must be something done out of the human heart and speaking to the human heart, and must largely turn upon instrumentalities that are in no way formal, and that have no dogma and have no creed, and which can not be put into writing, and can not be set upon the press--to a thought that I have had in my mind for some time as to the advancing of a new organization in this country--and, perhaps, you will sympathize with it--I have called it, for lack of a better name, "The League of American Fellowship," and there should be no condition for membership, excepting a pledge that each one gives that each year, or for one year, the member will undertake to interpret America sympathetically to at least one foreign-born person, or one person in the United States who does not have an understanding of American institutions, American traditions, American history, American sports, American life, and the spirit that is American. If you, upon your return to your homes, could organize in the cities that you represent, throughout the breadth of this land, some such league as that, and by individual effort, and without formalism, pledge the body of those with whom you come in contact to make Americans by sympathy and by understanding, I believe we would make great progress in the solution of this problem.

I do not know what method can be adopted for the making of Americans, but I think there can be a standard test as to the result. We can tell when a man is American in his spirit. There has been a test through which the men of this country--and the women, too--have recently passed--supposed to be the greatest of all tests--the test of war. When men go forth and sacrifice their lives, then we say they believe in something as beyond anything else; and so our men in this country, boys of foreign birth, boys of foreign parentage, Greek and Dane and Italian and Russian and Polander and Frenchman and Portuguese, Irish, Scotch--all these boys have gone to France, fought their fight, given up their lives, and they have proved, all Americans that they are, that there is a power in America by which this strange conglomeration of peoples can be melted into one, and by which a common attachment can be made and a common sympathy developed. I do not know how it is done, but it is done.

I remember once, thirty years or more ago, passing through North Dakota on a Northern Pacific train. I stepped off the platform, and the thermometer was thirty or forty degrees below zero. There was no one to be seen, excepting one man, and that man, as he stood before me, had five different coats on him to keep him warm; and I looked out over that sea of snow, and then I said, "Well, this is a pretty rough country, isn't it?" He was a Dane, I think, and he looked me hard in the eye and he said, "Young fellow, I want you to understand that this is God's own country."

Every one of those boys who returned from France came back feeling that this is God's own country. He knows little of America as a whole, perhaps; he can not recite any provisions in the Constitution of the United States; it may be that he has learned his English while in the Army; but some part of this country is "God's own country" to him. And it is a good thing that we should not lose the local attachments that we have--those narrownesses, those prejudices that give point to character. There is a kind of breadth that is shallowness; there is a kind of sympathy that has no punch. We must remember that if that world across the water is to be made what it can be under democratic forms, it is to be led by Democracy; and, therefore, the supreme responsibility falls upon us to make this all that a Democracy can be. And if there is a bit of local pride attaching to one part of our soil, that gives emphasis to our intense attachment to this country, let it be. I would not remove it. I come from a part of this country that is supposed to be more prejudiced in favor of itself than any other section. I remember years ago hearing that the Commissioner of Fisheries wished to propagate and spread in these Atlantic waters the western crab--which is about four times the size of the Atlantic crab--and so they sent two carloads of those crabs to the Atlantic coast. They were dumped into the Atlantic at Woods Hole, and on each crab was a little aluminum tablet saying "When found notify Fish Commission, Washington." A year passed and no crab was found; two years passed and no crab was found. And the third year two of those crabs were found by a Buenos Aires fisherman, who reported that they evidently were going south, bound around the Cape, returning to California.

A week or two ago I was addressing a Methodist conference in Baltimore, and I told this story to a dear old gray-headed man, seated opposite me, who was eighty-six years of age, who said he had been preaching there for sixty years; and I said to him, "Do you come from Maryland?" He said, "Yes, sir." He said, "I come from the Eastern Shore. Have you ever been there?" I said, "No; I am sorry that I have never been on the Eastern Shore." He said, "Never been there? Well, I am sorry for you." He said, "You know, we are a strange people down there--a strange people." He said, "We have some peculiar legends; some stories that have come down to us, generation after generation; and while other people may not believe them, we do; and one of the stories is that when Adam and Eve were in the Garden of Eden, they fell sick, and the Lord was greatly concerned about them, and he called a meeting of his principal angels and consulted with them as to what to do for them by way of giving them a change of air and improving their health; and the Angel Gabriel said, 'Why not take them down to the Eastern Shore?' And the Lord said, 'Oh, no; that would not be sufficient change.'"

And so, as you go throughout the United States, you find men attached to different parts of our continent, making their homes in different places, and not thinking often about the great country to which they belong, excepting as it is represented by that flag; and every one of those local attachments is a valuable asset to our country, and nothing should be done to minimize them. When the boys come back from France, every one of them says, "The thing I most desired while I was in France was to get home, for there I first realized how splendid and beautiful and generous and rich a country America was." We want to make these men who come to us from abroad realize what those boys realized, and we want to put inside of their spirits an appreciation of those things that are noble and fine in American law and American institutions and American life; and we want them to join with us as citizens in giving to America every good thing that comes out of every foreign country.

We are a blend in sympathies and a blend in art, a blend in literature, a blend in tendencies, and that is our hope for making this the supremely great race of the world. It is not to be done mechanically; it is not to be done scientifically; it is to be done by the human touch; by reaching some door into that strange man, with some word or some act that will show to him that there is in America the kind of sentiment and sympathy that that man's soul is reaching out for.

This is God's own country. We want the boys to know that the sky is blue and big and broad with hope, and that its fields are green with promise, and that in every one of our hearts there is the desire that the land shall be better than it is--while we have no apologies to make for what it is. This is no land in which to spread any doctrine of revolution, because we have abolished revolution. When we came here we gave over the right of revolution. You can not have revolution in a land unless you have somebody to revolt against--and whom would you revolt against in the United States? And when we won our revolution 140 years ago, we then said, "We give over that inherent right of revolution because there can be no such thing as revolution against a country in which the people govern."

We have no particular social theory to advocate in Americanization; no economic system to advocate; but we can fairly and squarely demand of every man in the United States, if he is a citizen, that he shall give supreme allegiance to the flag of the United States, and swear by it--and he is not worthy to be its citizen unless it holds first place in his heart.

The best test of whether we are Americans or not will not come, nor has it come, with war. It will come when we go hand in hand together, recognizing that there are defects in our land, that there are things lacking in our system; that our programs are not perfect; that our institutions can be bettered; and we look forward constantly by coöperation to making this a land in which there will be a minimum of fear and a maximum of hope.

ADDRESS AT THE COLLEGE OF THE HOLY CROSS[4]