Who Is an American?
WHO IS AN AMERICAN? JONES was walking home. He was walking because his head was swimming with matters that needed thinking out—with, if the truth must be told, quotations from a book he had...
...But everything depends upon what conclusions one arrives at from premises...
...we cannot presume—at least we cannot decently presume— to fix the type that will eventually prevail...
...When the futile computation about what fraction of a century each of us has spent here will be ended, we shall gain a clear impression of much that looms up in the darkness of night—of shadowy towers "built by the pennies of the poor...
...We housed them in offal and ground away their youth...
...And by the time Jones reached home—at a late and meditative hour—he had pretty well come to the conclusion that the problem of American nationhood is really the old problem of European civilization...
...Ultimately, it is what we are all interested in, when we think of the surging populace which mans our factories, our industries, our civic agencies and our farms...
...that the ratio of ingress should be adapted to the capacity of our social and economic institutions...
...Jones recalled that during the war—the very same grim struggle which, as Dr...
...But it is both perilous and unreasonable to attempt staking out, irrevocably, the definition of nationhood...
...Strong, self-conscious nationalities are indispensable to the efficient ordering of international relations...
...America is a spiritual reality...
...Henry Pratt Fairchild's The Melting-Pot Mistakes—sprinkled its urbane pages with phrases that flashed like spears...
...Was it mere narrow prejudice on his part...
...Interested as he was in the panorama his author evoked, he couldn't help seeing the whole thing from another point of view...
...The really calamitous thing, said Jones to himself, is not how much of the American status quo these people may have missed learning...
...And the ultimate purpose ? Dr...
...It is the only worth-while symbol of aristocracy...
...Hoped for, that is, if we desist from hampering the national character with dictatorial straitjackets devised by the speculative, and go bravely forward to the realization of what is abiding in the great civilization which our fathers shared in common...
...and of families reared patiently in the shadow of the fight for bread...
...The time has come to concede—at least in books which purport to be scholarly discussions of the subject—that this great thought of a common human civilization was conspicuously absent during the years when immigration was at its height...
...And then possibly we shall understand, as Jones seemed to, that the greatness of the task accomplished—the mere human task that has to do with the soul and its affections—is an augury of what may reasonably be hoped for in the future...
...And to his astonishment he discovered that the American guards who accosted him could not understand English...
...It is this we really wish to conserve, and not some petty, differentiated humor or trait of personality...
...Fairchild declares, that "parochial schools fall far short of the public schools as Americanizing agencies," and that antagonism to the prohibition laws comes from "millions of persons whose traditional attitude toward both the use of alcoholic drinks and constitutional government is so distinctly foreign that they cannot possibly even comprehend the character and spirit of this undertaking...
...With its major premises, Jones was not disposed to quarrel...
...Why, the whole process is only 150 years old...
...We dumped them into mines and foundries, and we jeered at their ache for home...
...That the "native population" of a hundred thousand little villages which have been all but physically dead since the wave of pioneering passed over their bean-stalks and their pansies would alone dictate the standard to which citizenship would approximate in years to come...
...Every well-developed nationality is a priceless product of social evolution...
...Or were hot in pursuit of each other, like so many electrons in a radio tube...
...that a certain variety of newcomer is below normal...
...The trouble with many people, he said to himself, is a manifest lack of patience...
...It is well enough to establish intelligent safeguards: to say that diversity of race is menacing and ought to be checked...
...For some reason—a flaw of character, perhaps— Jones was particularly struck by the fact that people who are always talking about evolution seldom stop to think about change...
...We have not, because we have boldly declared that all men are equal andt at least theoretically, free...
...We thought these crowds which came by steerage into the unknown were just so much more muscle for the great push toward national fortune...
...How can we devise tests of true assimilation ?" asked the book, after having made the point that current labels for citizenship are often spurious and inadequate...
...And, if to some extent we are now paying the price for a generation that was spawned in the dirt of industrialism, it is at least becoming reasonably clear that you cannot with impunity enslave the European...
...It happened to be a wiser and more urbane book than most of those devoted to similar subjects, but, nevertheless, it had nettled Jones...
...At least, not the king's English...
...He conceded, though possibly a little reluctantly, that the results of immigration had somehow proved disappointing...
...Well, the present which pays is wiser than the past which spent...
...It is the tap-root by reason of which we rise higher spiritually...
...And it struck Jones that he himself—and many another fellow-citizen whose ancestors had engaged passage on an early ship to these shores—were far less well satisfied about the value, the Tightness and the glory of the struggle than was the dirt-covered division of "scruff11 and "Hunyaks" whose helmets skimmed the surface of those dangerous ditches...
...He must devoutly wish to be Americanized," although it is a major part of the older resident's duty to "see that America shall be lovable.'' In other words, the goal of immigration is to conform —comfortably...
...The true Americans are those who embody most completely in their individual characters, and, taken as a mass, embody perfectly, the spiritual traits and qualities that make up the American nationality...
...But if we care to look at the matter realistically, does it appear in the least necessary that a national code which has been in existence only a century and a half should continue without modification...
...It may be so, Jones said to himself...
...But not even a professor of sociology would venture to declare that these schools or these people have played the devil with the future by a wholesale smashing of homes in the courts, or—as is revealed in this famous recent questionnaire from old Harvard—by shirking the sacrifice of race perpetuation...
...It may be, as Dr...
...of tremendous industry made successful by sweat and poverty...
...There is, of course, every reason why some of us should like to conserve a formula of consciousness which has been in the family during many years...
...But unfortunately this implies, when placed in conjunction with ideas of Americanism, that we have cared about aristocracy...
...Fairchild says, brought all the talk about nationhood to the fore—he had gone on a reconnoitering mission through a certain area of trenches and barbed wire...
...It is a body of ideas and ideals, traditions, beliefs, customs, habits, institutions, standards, loyalties, a whole complex of cultural and moral values...
...There remains just one conception of America which at all measures up to the deep-seated, subconscious image which the name suggests...
...It seems self-evident to them that once they have set up a type, a habit of conduct* 422 THE COMMONWEAL February 24, 1926 it is bound to endure forever...
...And what must the amateur American do if he wishes to be saved...
...We may properly speak of an American type that has been dominant...
...Was it the part of wisdom to feel that this rising young crowd would have nothing of its own to offer the cultural consciousness of America...
...Summoning the hillbillies and the Cincinnati, the petrified yokel and the heirs of Concord, to a kind of convention that shall underwrite an everlasting spiritual constitution for America—this is to invite from the satirical gods a triumphant "razz...
...And he was quite ready to grant that there are deep human differences—of race and tradition—which it would be futile to ignore and which muddle American community life...
...For the child is the shadow of its father—when there is any sun...
...The book—Dr...
...He got on much better with signs...
...it is rather how much of the old peasant and bourgeois virtues they may have lost...
...He was walking because his head was swimming with matters that needed thinking out—with, if the truth must be told, quotations from a book he had just put down...
...Fairchild packed it into convenient form by saying: "The central factor in the world organization of the present is nationalism...
Vol. 3 • February 1926 • No. 16
