Part 2
25. Number and Per cent of Petitioners for three age groups 242
26. Racial Distribution of Petitioners for the age periods “over twenty-one” “15-20” and “1-14” 246
27. Number of Declarations made in “Other” States 249
28. Principal Occupations Represented in Petitions for Naturalizations filed in seven Cities 1913-1914, ratio between Number of Petitioners and total of Foreign Born White Males in those Occupations in those Cities in 1910 251
29. Number and Per Cent of Petitioners in Each Occupation 252
30. Allegiance of Aliens Registered under the Selective Service Act 268
31. Fitness for Service of Alien Registrants 269
32. Neutrals withdrawing from the Service 273
33. Diplomatic Requests for Discharge of and Total Registration of Aliens by Country of Birth 277
34. Comparison of Reported Desertions of Alien and Citizen Registrants 281
35. Years in which full and partial Suffrage was Granted to Women, by States 303
36. Maximum Enrollment in Citizenship and English classes, in United States in 1919 322
37. Per Cent of New York City Vote Cast for McCall in 1913, Dix in 1910 by Voters of Native Parentage 350
38. Per Cent of New York City Vote Cast for McCall in 1913, Dix in 1910 by Russians and Austrians 350
39. Per Cent of New York City Vote Cast for McCall in 1913, Dix in 1910 by the Irish 351
40. Per Cent of New York City Vote Cast for McCall in 1913, Dix in 1910 by Germans 352
41. Per Cent of New York City Vote Cast for McCall in 1913, Dix in 1910 by Italians 352
42. Per Cent of Socialist Vote in New York City in 1910 and 1913 by Nationality 353
43. Distribution of Dominant Nationality in ninety-two precincts in Cleveland 358
44. Distribution of Democratic and Republican Votes in Cleveland in 1913-1915 among Certain Racial Groups 361
45. Per Cent of Certain Races Exercising Second and Third Choice 362
46. Vote Cast in precincts of Varying Racial Make-up in Three Wards of Grand Rapids, 1918, 1919 366
47. Per Cent of Women Registered in thirteen Michigan cities 368
48. Number of Socialists paying dues each year from 1903 to 1915 382
49. Ranks of Race Groups in Relative Socialist Strength 384
50. Socialist Vote for President from 1880 to 1898 385
51. The Socialist Vote for President by States from 1900 to 1920 386
52. Per Cent Circulation of the German Press in nine states 388
53. Socialist Vote for President in nine states from 1900 to 1916 389
54. Membership of the Nonpartisan League by states in December, 1918 398
55. Distribution of Petitions Studied, by Courts 429
56. Sex and Marital Condition of Petitioners 430
57. Petitioners’ Children Under twenty-one years of age 431
58. Age of Petitioners at Arrival and Time Elapsing between twenty-one years of age (or later arrival) and Petition, 1913-1914 432
59. Number and Per Cent of Petitions Denied for each Cause, by Courts _Facing_ 432
60. Number of Petitions Denied for each Cause, by Country of Birth _Facing_ 432
61. Distribution of Petitioners, by Country of Birth and Courts _Facing_ 432
62. Distribution of Petitioners, Length of Time from Arrival to Petition, by Country of Birth _Facing_ 432
63. Distribution of Petitions, by Occupation and Courts 433
64. Average Number of Years from Date of Arrival to Date of Petition, by Occupation 434
65. Number of Petitioners, by Country of Birth and Occupation _Facing_ 434
66. Ratio between Naturalization Petitions filed in 1913-1914 and Total Foreign Born White Males ten years of age and over in 1910, by Occupation for seven cities _Facing_ 434
LIST OF DIAGRAMS
DIAGRAM PAGE
1. Average interval before filing petition after attainment of twenty-one years (or time of arrival, if arriving after twenty-one years) for petitioners arriving at ages of one to fourteen, fifteen to twenty, and twenty-one years and over 242
2. Average interval before filing petition after arrival at age twenty-one or over by races. The bars which are in black represent countries from which the subject people constituted almost entirely the immigration to this country 245
INTRODUCTION
It would require a very long list of names to give specific mention of all those who have rendered substantial aid in gathering the information on which this volume is based. The Commissioner of Naturalization, Mr. Richard K. Campbell; the former Director of Citizenship, Mr. Raymond F. Crist, and the chief examiners under their direction, have done all in their power to afford information and other assistance. Several hundred judges of naturalization courts in all parts of the country, took pains to answer our questionnaire and personal letters on special questions. Students of immigration and naturalization problems have been ungrudging in their co-operation.
The tedious and painstaking work of compiling the information contained in more than 26,000 petitions for naturalization, analyzed in the statistical chapters of this book, was done more especially under the direction of Professor Raymond Moley, then at Western Reserve University, Cleveland; Hornell Hart, of Cincinnati; Professor S. C. Kohs, of Reed College, for Portland, Oregon; Professor T. T. Waterman, of the University of the state of Washington, for Seattle, and Professor L. H. Hawkins, of Clark University, for Worcester, Mass. Aside from the service of these volunteer assistants, thanks are due in more than perfunctory manner to the members of the staff of the Americanization Study who devoted long hours to this exacting task.
Professor Moley compiled most of the material used in the chapter on the legal aspects of citizenship, and afforded information of the utmost value woven into other parts of this volume.
The thanks of the author are due in particular to his personal associates in the work, Mr. Paul Lee Ellerbe, formerly Chief Naturalization Examiner at Denver, and Miss Elizabeth Miner King, then of the staff of the New York Evening Post, now Mrs. Harold Phelps Stokes, of Washington, D. C.
JOHN PALMER GAVIT
AMERICANS BY CHOICE
AMERICANS BY CHOICE
I
OF THEIR OWN FREE WILL
From the point of view of citizenship there are two kinds of Americans--those who are American involuntarily by birth, and those who are _American by choice_.
This book devotes itself to those who have become Americans not by birth, but of their own free will and accord, by that process of voluntarily adopting a fatherland known as Naturalization. It endeavors to tell generally what happens to them in that process, and something of what they do and contribute to our _political_ life after they have been admitted to active membership in our body politic.
The subject is one much talked about--especially since the beginning of the World War--and little understood save by those who administer, or who in some way profit by, the operation, the shortcomings, and confusions of the existing law and the system which has grown up under it. That system is handicapped and beclouded by public indifference and by the survival of ancient attitudes and limitations, and bedeviled by the theories and prejudices of persons and interests who, innocently or willfully--often with impeccable intentions--stand in the way of progress or adhere for various reasons to ideas and methods long since outgrown, or in the light of to-day actively mischievous.
THESE ARE OUR VOTERS!
It is a current fashion of unthinking persons, contemplating the seething masses of immigrants congested in our cities and in certain rural sections, beholding the polyglot store signs and newspapers, sensing the existence of languages, manners, and customs unfamiliar and perhaps grotesque and even outrageous to their own habits and ideas of propriety, and reflecting vaguely upon the real and supposed evils of our political methods and machinery, to exclaim:
“And these are the people who corrupt our politics! These are the voters who elect our presidents!”
Many who should know better indulge in such absurdities, and even cite statistics to support them. A characteristic manner of reasoning would read something like this:
“In 1910 there were 13,000,000 foreign-born persons in the United States, and only a little more than 3,000,000 of them were naturalized!”
Leaving the unreflecting hearer to forget that of the 13,000,000 only about half (6,646,817) were males of twenty-one years and over; that more than half a million (570,772) had declared their intention to become citizens; that there was no report as to the citizenship of more than 775,000; so that the alien population of voting age, and of the then voting sex, known to be unnaturalized, was only about one-sixth of the total foreign born, or 2,266,535. This was bad enough in all conscience, and the Woman-Suffrage Amendment to the Constitution of the United States certainly has aggravated it, since through it married immigrant women were made possible voters through the naturalization of their husbands. But nothing can be gained by exaggerating the facts, or constructing mare’s nests by inferences from false assumptions. It is worth while to examine the conditions, to observe the extent to which the foreign born actually do participate in our political processes, and on the basis of such facts as are available, to judge the effect that foreign birth does tend to have upon the quality of that participation.
There is no disposition here to overlook or minimize the menace to our social and civic life involved in the presence of vast masses of undigested, unassimilated population of whatever race or kind--even of our own people, herded in colonies, dominating large communities, illiterate as regards our history and ideals, ignorant of our language, traditions, and customs. It constitutes a social problem of great magnitude and intricacy--though probably by no means so menacing as it is our fashion to believe. But it is not one directly affecting our political life or the operation of our political machinery to any such degree as it is the custom to declaim. There is little substantial evidence in these days that the foreign-born voter, as such, is a source of corruption or other evil influence in our politics.
PRIMITIVE ATTITUDES TOWARD IMMIGRANTS
Whether it is called an instinct, native in animal psychology, or an inheritance of mental habit and tradition handed down from remote times of family and tribal necessity, the fact is that we all regard the stranger with a suspicion, diminishing perhaps as we broaden with years, experience, and culture, but never entirely lost. Exceedingly few are those great souls who have no trace of it. Especially if the stranger wears a differently colored skin, expresses his thought by unfamiliar vocal sounds and inflections, practices customs of clothing, eating, marriage, religion, different from our own; lives in houses of peculiar shape and use--these things all partake, for the average person, of the outrageous and the dangerous, and usually subtly offend those habits of group taste which we somehow feel to have their roots in essential morality and the nature of things.
From time immemorial, all states and communities have laid special disabilities and limitations upon the alien--all based ultimately upon this habitual suspicion of those who belong to another tribe or clan. As Edwin M. Borchard says:[1]
The legal position of the alien has in the progress of time advanced from that of complete outlawry, in the days of early Rome and the Germanic tribes, to that of practical assimilation with nationals, at the present time. In the Twelve Tables of Rome, the alien and enemy were classed together, the word “hostis” being used interchangeably to designate both. Only the Roman citizen had rights recognized in law.... The Germanic tribes, in the early period, were hardly more hospitable to the alien than were the Twelve Tables of the Romans.
With the extension of trade and travel, and especially with the upgrowth of the feudal system, however, the utility of intercourse with peaceable strangers, and the advantage of adding their personal prowess, capacity, and assets to the resources of the community, came to be more and more recognized, and the stranger within the gates was accorded an increasing measure of tolerance, not to say welcome. But this tolerance was at best of a very limited character; practically, it was not much more than a rigid systematizing of the ways of making the immigrant useful and contributory. It is not the province of this report to dilate upon this branch of the subject. Suffice it to say that to this day, over nearly the whole earth, the alien is still subject to marked limitations, and that the exploitation of him is neither a modern nor an American invention.
As for political rights, let alone any degree of participation in the functions of government, no nation ever has contemplated the possibility of such a thing--until a few of the American states, clamoring for population from any corner of humanity, offered virtually full political participation to the alien immediately upon his mere declaration of intention to apply for citizenship--some day! Until the excitement of the World War brought public attention to the whole question of the position and influence of the foreign born in America, this anomaly remained in force in at least a dozen states: Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Texas, and Oregon. Since then it has been abolished by constitutional amendment or other legislation in all but two--Arkansas and Missouri.[2]
LEGAL POSITION OF THE ALIEN
Thus far, from the point of view of international law and custom, it has been left to each nation to regulate the privileges of, and the restrictions upon, the alien, with the exception that certain nations strong enough to enforce it have established in certain countries held by them to be less than fully “civilized,” the principle of _extra-territoriality_, by virtue of which their nationals must be tried before special tribunals supervised by representatives of their own nation. Generally speaking, and subject to the rule that aliens of all races must be treated alike under processes of law, a nation may deprive the alien of liberty of action, may prohibit or restrict his ownership of property, may forbid or delimit his employment in certain kinds of work or enterprises, and may expel and deport him, at its pleasure. In other words, the status and rights of an alien are determined almost absolutely by the municipal law in the country in which he is domiciled. The only limitations upon this power are those established by treaties, and by the general spread of humane ideas, and the growing feeling--discouraged, perhaps, but by no means halted, by the World War--of the solidarity of the human race.
In the United States, the rights of the alien include personal protection, protection of property already acquired, and the use of all means of redress and judicial protection enjoyed by citizens.[3]
The alien’s plight in this country has been complicated by the peculiar relation subsisting between the Federal government and that of the individual states. For it has frequently happened that the government of the United States has been practically unable to enforce the rights of aliens created by treaty when traversed by state law. On more than one occasion threatening diplomatic situations have been created by the existence of this condition.
This ancient feeling toward the alien, and the treatment, legal, extra-legal, and illegal, to which he has been subjected in respect of his person, his family, and his property, undoubtedly have affected substantially his sentiments toward this country. Disillusionment about the atmosphere and ways of the “Land of the Free” is responsible for our loss of the citizenship of many desirable immigrants. The man who will not submit quietly to injustice is of the material of which our best citizens from the beginning have been made. The kind of aliens who can accept without resentment some of the things to which those of foreign birth and speech have been subjected within our borders during very recent times, are not fit to be Americans![4]
WHAT IS AN “AMERICAN”?
We are concerned just now, however, with the alien, not in his general legal or social relations, but as material for active membership in our community as an American citizen, as a voting participant in the sovereignty held in this country by the people. As such, he comes to a position unique in all the world. It is not yet true--perhaps it will be very long before it can be true--that there is absolutely no bar to any person on account of race; for the law and its interpretations exclude from citizenship Chinese, Japanese, and certain people of India not regarded as “white”--although the blacks of Africa are expressly admitted. Nevertheless it may be said broadly that, regardless of race, the immigrant can come to America and win his way upon his own merits into the fellowship of what all the world calls “Americans.”
Now, what is “an American”? What is it that makes a nation of us if not a distinctive race? What is it that the immigrant joins, body and soul, when he becomes “an American”?
Every little while somebody arises with ashes upon his head and bemoans the threatened disappearance of what he is pleased to call “the American type.” He never describes it--it is exceedingly difficult to learn what may be meant by the phrase. This is not strange, for there is no such thing if a racial type is meant. There never has been any such thing.
Perhaps we know what the expression might mean in New England--a combination of English, Scotch, or Welsh, who in turn would be bred of Dane, Pict, and Scot, Saxon and Norman and Kelt, with perhaps a strain of French, or maybe of Dutch. In Pennsylvania very likely it would be English Quaker--or Plattdeutsch. The French-Spanish combination in the Gulf region, the Scandinavian or German in the Middle West and Northwest, the Spanish-Mexican along the Rio Grande and in Southern California, and so on, are “American” by a title as good as that of those who trace their descent from the Pilgrim Fathers.
John Graham Brooks[5] remarks that “our piebald millions” are now so interwoven with all that we are “that to silhouette the American becomes yearly more baffling.” Says he:
The early writers have no such misgivings.... In 1889 I met a German correspondent who had been four times to the United States.... He said he brought back from his first journey a clearly conceived image of the American. He was “sharp-visaged, nervous, lank, and restless.” After the second trip this group of adjectives was abandoned. He saw so many people who were not lank or nervous; so many were rotund and leisurely, that he rearranged his classification, but still with confidence. After a third trip he insisted that he could still describe our countrymen, but not by external signs. He was driven to express them in terms of character. The American was resourceful, inventive, and supreme in the pursuit of material ends. “My fourth trip,” he said, “has knocked out the final attempt with the others. I have thrown them all over like a lot of rubbish. I don’t know what the American is, and I don’t believe anyone else knows.”
Prof. Franklin H. Giddings, in an informal address at Columbia University, undertook, albeit somewhat casually, to point out the characteristics which should mark a good American. He must be loyal, must “play the game”; must have a local pride not only in the quality of his country but in his home community, feeling and exemplifying a moral and civic responsibility for the betterment of conditions actuated by a wise and constructive idealism. Recognizing, no doubt, in the very saying of this, that these things would mark the good citizen of _any_ nation, he protested that after all was said, and despite the difficulty of precise definition, there was something distinctive, perceptible, and, in fact, perceived by the discerning; real, however subtle and elusive, distinguishing the true American from all other folk--“a certain sensitiveness to the finer values of life; an admiration for these things.”
Well, certainly the ideal American is, and has, and does all of this; certainly all Americans ought to be, and have, and do all of it! But in all candor and fairness it must be acknowledged that it would be invidious and altogether insupportable to claim it or _any_ of it as in any proper sense racially distinctive of America.
THE AMERICAN HAS NO RACIAL MARKS
We cannot isolate any physical characteristics; we cannot segregate any particular racial descent; one may search in vain for any definable hereditary mental or spiritual characteristic that will fit or typify all, or even many, of the “piebald millions” who inhabit and vote, attain success and honor, and, at need, enlist or be conscripted for war, in the varied jurisdictions of our tremendous stretch of territory between the ancient French-Canadian colonies of Maine and the Philippines; between the Virgin Islands and Alaska. Even local adherence to our slogans of liberty, democracy, consent-of-the-governed, and all the rest of our ecstatic vocabulary, no longer insulates or distinguishes us in the world. The upspringing democracies of the Old World, to which we have given example and inspiration as well as emancipation from old autocracies, swear by all these phrases as exuberantly as we, and may even outstrip us in the political incarnation of the ideals which hitherto we have regarded as so peculiarly our own!
If, then, we can distinguish “the American” neither by any physical attribute of race nor by adherence to political forms and formulæ, what is there left for us to conserve and to boast about--as our very own?