WHO'S THAT KNOCKING AT OUR DOOR?
Hesseltine, William B.
Who's That Knocking At Our Door? The Clashing Faiths And Hopes Of The Immigrant And Political Refugee By WILLIAM B. HESSELTINE DURING the years since the beginning of the Hitler terror in Europe,...
...America, say the humanitarians, has always been the asylum for the persecuted of Europe...
...They danced together, ate together, made love across ideological lines, and demonstrated—all unknowing—that democracy and the American way had merits which transcended their totalitarian concepts...
...Gustav was a socialist, a democrat, a progressive...
...Many, before the Civil War, thirsting for democracy, threw themselves into the anti-slavery struggle...
...The division was well illustrated, this past Summer, by an experiment carried on by a group, of Quakers...
...During July and August, the American Friends Service Committee assembled, from various American universities, groups of some 40 foreign students.' In one of these groups the students had been, on an average, five years in the United States...
...He came with his wife and infant son, with his box of tinner's tools, and with the skills learned in a hard apprenticeship...
...Historically, the United States has recognized a difference between the immigrant and the political fugitive...
...to light the lamp of liberty that was America's mission...
...But in America, a man might hope to change the order...
...Always they remembered the vision that here they might set an example of democracy, to the world...
...They made contributions to American culture...
...that government is, at best, a necessary evil...
...One observer, who spent a week with the group, went to teach but stayed to learn...
...The political refugee seeks only a temporary haven from which he can plot his triumphant return to his homeland: The immigrant, on the other hand, was an American in spirit before he boarded a west-bound boat...
...And they conceived of world government in the same terms...
...But each wanted that particular kind of world government which would best advance him in dominating his own country...
...So they said in free discussion, gathered in a group which embodied the essence of the democratic process...
...There, on a secluded school campus, in a quiet village in: the New England hills, was a microcosm of nations and ideas of the world...
...Heinrich, too, went to a Wisconsin city...
...Liberty Enlightening the World" was no empty phrase to Americans and to the America-bound immigrant...
...Moreover, in recent months, executive agreements have opened the possibility of housing a few thousand more refugees in American concentration camps...
...that whole areas of human relationships lie beyond the confines of governmental action...
...Specifically, the humanitarians have demanded that American immigration laws be relaxed, and the gates of the country be flung wide to welcome the oppressed...
...Liberal and forward looking in their social objectives, they favored a global gestapo, operating under a super-state, to enforce the Four Freedoms...
...As students in American schools, they had been concerned primarily in supporting the United States' intervention in their homelands, but they had given no study to the land of their temporary residence...
...Some came from scholarly families, some from official circles, some from artistic groups, some from the proletariat...
...With one accord, the humanitarians have demanded that the United States do something about it...
...They had, in fact, no objection to government on the Nazi or Communist model...
...no condemnation of totalitarianism per se...
...Not by bayonets, not by imperialistic conquest, not even by missionary propaganda, but solely by example, would the gospel of liberty be spread...
...That mission was to create an exr ample of democracy...
...But they demonstrated, too, the vast gulf between the immigrant and the refugee...
...There were Greeks, Germans, Hungarians, Austrians, Poles, Ukranians, Czechs, French, and British among them...
...The difference between Gustav and Heinrich is a difference in orientation...
...As he built, he saw that the economic and social order did not conform to the dreams of the socialist tinsmith in Silesia...
...It has, however—with varying degrees of enthusiasm—welcomed those who had caught the vision of America and came to make homes for themselves in the New World...
...They would retain the Gestapo, the GPU, even the elite SS...
...These minor concessions, relieving a comparative handful of fortunate refugees, cannot have an appreciable effect in mitigating the inhumanity of the Nazis, but they do raise some fundamental questions in the United States...
...If they come of themselves," he said, "they are entitled to the rights of citizenship...
...Every conical dust-catcher perched atop an industrial plant, every roof, every tin gadget in the complex mechanism of the throbbing factories bore some part of him...
...They worked freely together...
...Long ago, Thomas Jefferson surveyed the situation and pronounced a sound judgment...
...But five years in America had not brought them any understanding of American democracy or of American concepts of popular government...
...Jefferson's Criterion America, it is true, has always been a haven for Europe's oppressed, but it has not been a hostelry for political refugees...
...Heinrich advised the Government on technical.details of the German system...
...They were ignorant of America's history, its traditions, its ideals...
...Some brought with them a love of music, some were scientists, some philosophers...
...But more than that, he believed in the American mission...
...It is a difference, too, in the whole concept of government and of society...
...They were, as a group, enthusiastic about world government...
...The Clashing Faiths And Hopes Of The Immigrant And Political Refugee By WILLIAM B. HESSELTINE DURING the years since the beginning of the Hitler terror in Europe, the plight of those who have succeeded in fleeing from the Nazi domain has touched the hearts of humane people throught the world...
...In times past, the United States has shown no enthusiasm for those who would make its shores a scene of conspiracy against other governments...
...They believed, so they said, in democracy...
...between the one who came to build a new hope for the world and the transient seeker for asylum whose eyes remain focussed upon Europe's bloody pplitics...
...he wrote letters to the papers...
...They had lost faith in all other human institutions—in schools, and churches, and corporations, and even in labor unions...
...He learned, for example, that_although many of them talked, glibly enough, the language of internationalism, each was an ardent nationalist...
...Last year, for example, only 28,551 aliens entered the United States as permanent residents while 113,641 entered on temporary permits...
...secretaries, government officials, foreign propagandists, war-mongers, journalists, deans of women, Communists, missionaries, isolationists, and laborites...
...Some came to enrich the land with experiments in Utopian Socialism...
...Whereas both alike are fleeing from economic hardship, or social discrimination, or political persecution in Europe, there is a difference in the motives behind their migration...
...So they said, standing literally in the shadow of a New England town hall...
...Under such pressure, the United States immigration officials have quietly relaxed their former vigilance...
...The French Communists were as nationalistic as the avowed French Nationalists...
...Yet the spirit of the group was good...
...Lured by that vision, and inspired by the faith that thus, and thus alone, could the world be saved, the immigrants came to America...
...To consult with them, lecture to them, and guide their studies, the Friends sent a succession of pundits [of whom this author was one] representing every variety of opinion and interest: clergymen, social workers, economists, Hindu mystics, historians, Y.M.C.A...
...He educated his son, sent him to high school, and watched with mounting pride as the boy worked his way through the state university and became a distinguished scholar...
...But more than asylum, it offered hope...
...Later they battled for free schools, f ought'the Populist fight, struggled to organize labor to defend its rights...
...Whereas the quota system for immigration remains the same, the officials have permitted visitors, students, government officials, laborers, and persons in transit to enter in unprecedented numbers...
...Such an immigrant believed, with the Americans who had preceded him, in the moral law, and in human progress...
...One of these who came, late in the '80s, was Gustav, a Silesian tinsmith...
...No decent person could condone the race hatreds and the nationalistic prejudices Which have driven these unfortunates from their homes, and no decent American would deny them succor, nor refuse them food, shelter, and protection...
...he went on a lecture tour...
...The Czech Communist was a flag-waving Czech before she was a Communist...
...Their concepts of government, too, were strange to 'America...
...He did not get rich...
...His youthful socialism cost him his business in his native European village, and a neighbor who had migrated to Wisconsin wrote glowing words of praise for America...
...He wae pleased when the war came, and he waits impatiently but confidently for the day when American armies will make his homeland safe for his triumphal return...
...They knew nothing of the American concept that government should be limited in its scope...
...Five millions sought that hope in the generation before the Civil War, 10 million more came between 1860 and 1890, and almost twice that many entered between 1890 and the closing of the gates in 1921...
...America was a great experiment in human freedom, and the immigrant wanted to work to make the experiment succeed...
...Their ages ranged from 18 to 50...
...Gustav The Tinsmith They came to build a new world...
...They debated, with emotional conviction, their points of view...
...He was not like Heinrich, the lawyer, who fled from the Nazi's misshapen justice...
...Heinrich thrilled the ladies clubs with atrocity' stories ; he urged the luncheon clubs to go to war with his country...
...Gustav was no political refugee, biding his time until he could make a Quisling's return to his native village...
...They would rely solely on government—on an all-powerful state which would thrust a controlling hand into* every act of man...
...There the upper classes, the intellectuals, the Anglophiles, and the well-housed Stalinists wined and dined him, lunched him and cocktailed him, and gasped admiringly at the lurid details of his escape...
...Once upon a time Americans knew that they could achieve a free society and a democratic government which would, by the mere force of its example, set men free all over the world...
...Some of them were Communists, committed by the dogmas of their creed to internationalism, but ^hey were Nationalist-Communists...
...There were others, too: a Chinese colonel, Filipinos, a Haitian educator, a Nisei Japanese, a New England capitalist, and a North Carolina Negro...
...They would only convert them from agencies serving one party to instruments of another...
...He lived on a little farm outside the city, and when work was slack his cow, his chickens, and his pigs kept him from hunger...
...But Jefferson specifically proposed limiting admission to those "manifesting a bona fide purpose of embarking his life and fortunes permanently with us...
...They came, for the most part, from Europe, and they represented every area—-Allied, occupied, and enemy—of that war-torn continent...
...He came to a growing industrial city on Lake Michigan's shores—to a' city where an honest craftsman might help to build a better world...
...The immigrants whom Jefferson would admit to the rights of citizenship, were those who understood and subscribed to the cardinal tenets of the democratic faith...
...Not once has he looked back to Germany...
...They were even prepared, most of them, to scoff at American democracy...
...Democracy, in their minds, was equated with a claSs-conscious labor movement, and since the American workingman was not adequately class-conscious, there was no democracy in America...
...Endless war and conscript armies, a tyrannous church and a predatory ruling class ground men to subservience in Europe...
...The Quakers, with fine disregard for superficial individual differences and a supreme faith in democratic processes, gathered this interesting group into a "seminar" to study the problems of postwar Europe...
...But slowly, almost imperceptibly, he built a monument to the dream that had lured him from Silesia...
...Gustav caught the American vision, saw the hope that the American mission held, and migrated...
...He voted Socialist, he was one more in the ranks of those that followed Old Bob La Follette, and today, in his eighties, he reads each week every line in The Progressive...
...For 50 years every new factory in his city bore his handiwork...
...But the humanitarians who are demanding that all political refugees from Europe be allowed to cluster around the skirts of the Statue of Liberty are misinterpreting the meaning of American history, and are basing their arguments on false assumptions...
...He was an American before he got on the boat at Hamburg, and his vision of America's mission has stayed clear...
...America offered asylum, indeed...
Vol. 8 • October 1944 • No. 44
