Part 24

Who shall forecast the effect of this wholesale admission of aliens to full citizenship and potential political power in the United States? How many of these men were among those whom, in earlier proceedings, the rigorous precautions of the past had kept at arm’s length? They came up in courts far from their home jurisdiction; no longer was the esteem of neighbor a prerequisite; no longer was it necessary to have lived even one year in any particular vicinage--or, indeed, to have any residence at all! There can be no checking up, even now, to see whether even a criminal record should have debarred the applicant; the Bureau of Naturalization was more than 500,000 behind in the examination of naturalization certificates even before this flood of new ones was poured in upon its overworked force!

In the old days, before the establishment of the Naturalization Service, there was hurried admission of thousands of aliens, regardless of qualifications, within short periods, and it was deemed a dreadful menace to our institutions. Of course this was very different from every point of view; but was the difference sufficient to guarantee real assimilation into the spirit that we like to believe characterizes sound American citizenship?

WHAT SOME JUDGES THOUGHT OF IT

The questions addressed by the Americanization Study in the summer of 1919 to the naturalizing judges throughout the country included this question:

Do you believe that the admission of large numbers of aliens under the Act of May 9, 1918, solely on the ground of military or naval service, without the usual requirements of residence, etc., operated on the whole to the advantage of the United States?

The paucity and hesitation, even reluctance, of the replies are a striking evidence of the impossibility of answering the question. Of 356 judges who gave any attention at all to the question, 110 frankly declared themselves unable to express any opinion whatever. Thirteen were in grave doubt, inclining to the negative; 16 said only, “I hope so”; 108 replied flatly, “No.” The others (109) in various phrases expressed their affirmative. But many of these affirmatives were greatly qualified. Some thought the advantage applied only or chiefly to those soldiers who had volunteered; others believed that the mental and physical training and the psychological effect of imperiling his life for the flag would offset the evils involved in hasty admission of the otherwise unqualified individual. Many argued that, whatever the doubts about the wisdom of the policy, it was “only fair,” “it is their right,” “you cannot deny citizenship to a man whom you compel to fight for the country,” etc.

“I held up about 68 Germans and Austrians,” says one judge, whose vote was an emphatic “No”; “but the government at Washington advised taking them in--and they were.”

In a number of instances the judges declared that they went against their own judgment in admitting men whom they regarded as unfit--naturalizing them only upon the insistence of the representatives of the Naturalization Service. An eloquent illustration of the about-face in the policy of the Bureau!

“No, decidedly!” cried a Michigan judge. “It was a colossal blunder!”

“An impulsive act of Congress,” answers another; while an Iowa judge voices the opinion of many in saying:

Mere willingness to fight is not necessarily an indication of either patriotism or fitness.

Among these judges were several worthy of note who officiated at the naturalization of very large numbers of soldiers. The striking fact is that these, almost without exception, were in various degrees enthusiastic in their expressions of belief that the policy was a good one. Some contented themselves with a mere “Yes” for answer. Among these was one who naturalized more than 10,000 men at one of the great camps of debarkation. Here are a few characteristic expressions from others:

“They gave the best evidence of loyalty.”

“It was the best thing to do under the circumstances.”

“I do not see how the government could do otherwise with men in the service before allowing them to go overseas.”

“Yes. I have naturalized 400 and 500 men at a time, and seen their enthusiasm for this country, which, in my judgment, was no sham.”

“My policy was to decide for the applicant wherever I could under the facts.”

“I found in a majority of cases aliens in the armed service were as enthusiastic as our own native-born sons.”

HERE WAS “ATTACHMENT TO OUR PRINCIPLES”!

The naturalization of an alien under our laws [says Commissioner Campbell][145] may be compared justly to the “coming of age” celebration of the heir of a great estate. It is the formal recognition of an accomplished fact, the attainment of manhood with all of its implications of the putting away of childish things and the assumption of the obligations that mark the mature and responsible personality.... The vital thing to bear in mind in considering the statistics of naturalization is that these figures represent human beings, and human beings in that most important stage of human progress stepping upward from the infantile stage of blind and unquestioning obedience, backed by external compulsion, to the plane of political maturity which not alone has a part in the making of laws, but, what is more important, must obey the laws from an inward and self-imposed sense of obligation.... Genuine citizenship is primarily a state of inward feeling, and only secondarily one of knowledge. It is not impossible for one to be a good citizen who is ignorant of the forms of our government or who even has no very clear mental conception of the basic principles upon which it is founded.

The completion of the nationalizing process is marked for every essential spiritual purpose, as Professor Weatherly said,[146] “when the things of the spirit are held in common and cherished by all,” or, as Renan expresses it, when the people “have a common glory,” by reason of having “done great things together.”

* * * * *

How may a man more convincingly show his “attachment to the principles of the Constitution,” his benevolence toward “the good order and happiness” of his country, than by imperiling his life for it? “Greater love hath no man than this.”

A candidate for naturalization, in ordinary conditions exhibiting knowledge of the legal relationship between the Federal and state governments, knowing the name of the President of the United States, the date of the battle of Bunker Hill, the cause of Shay’s Rebellion, and when the yellow fever came to Boston, may have no more idea of what the flag of the United States means and might mean than he has of the mental processes of the ichthyosaurus; his very plenitude of intellectual accomplishment may indeed make him only the greater menace to the essential welfare of his community.

But when he becomes a citizen in the very act and fact of going forth under that flag to lay down his life for what it stands for--what better thing can he do, what better evidence can he offer, of his “inward and self-imposed sense of obligation?” Nay, more, how better may he show that he is enlisting in the service of his new country something that was kindred in the old? There was a ringing challenge to all our smug self-sufficiency in what the Bohemians bore on their banner in that Cleveland parade:

AMERICANS, DO NOT BE DISCOURAGED: WE HAVE BEEN FIGHTING THESE TYRANTS FOR THREE HUNDRED YEARS!

Many of us looked upon these men as somehow sneaking into a privilege, overlooking the fact that they were bringing us a gift!

ASSIMILATING THE ENEMIES OF TYRANNY

We are hardly yet awake to the wonder of what happened, to the magnitude of the work of national assimilation that took place all in a moment. We were very stupid about it. One of the most important officers of our army, charged with great responsibility in the preparations for the war, naïvely confessed some time after the United States had entered upon it, that he did not know who were the Czecho-Slovaks, or from what part of the world they came! And it was only with the greatest difficulty that the army authorities were made to realize that most of the races making up that political nightmare known as Austria-Hungary desired nothing so much as the chance to help overthrow the unspeakable tyranny from which they had fled, against which they and their fathers had “been fighting for three hundred years.” Better than the Allies themselves they understood the cause of the Allies, yet to the American army authorities they were only “enemy aliens”!

It was in keeping with our statistical customs, not only in the Naturalization and Immigration Bureaus, but in the very census itself, to class an Austrian as an Austrian, knowing little and caring less about the world of difference between a Magyar and a Czech, between a Croat and a Slovak--though all were “Austrians” to the superficial eye of the census enumerator--and the General Staff of the United States army, which was going to war against “Austria” with absurdly, unpardonably vague, notions as to what an “Austrian” might be! It required a vigorous campaign of education before there could emerge even a fair, working intelligence in this regard; but emerge it finally did, and the anti-Austrian “Austrians” at last got their chance to go forth as American citizens under the Stars and Stripes to help give the _coup de grâce_ to the old oppressor of themselves, their fathers, and their fathers’ fathers.

EPISODES OF MILITARY NATURALIZATION

In one army division, at Fort Riley, Kansas, thirty nationalities were represented by the candidates for citizenship, including not only the pseudo-Austrians, but Rumania, Serbia, Bulgaria, Montenegro, Armenia, Syria, Guatemala, Honduras, the Azores, and most of the rest of the civilized world. At Fort Riley was made the record of “forty-three citizens in forty minutes.” At Camp Devens, Massachusetts, more than 2,000 men were admitted to citizenship and took the oath of allegiance in one operation, lined up on the parade-ground by nationalities. A New York State court naturalized soldiers of fifty-six racial varieties on the first day of the visiting court.

In a session of court held in a Tennessee encampment the court crier opened the ceremonies with his, “Oyez! Oyez!” and a procession of dignitaries, military and civil, marched in under the flags for the ceremonial--a solemn invocation, an address by a venerable judge, and the crash of “The Star-spangled Banner.” Then the general made a speech, in which he welcomed each of those who a little while before had been “strangers and foreigners,” and dubbed him “one of _our_ men.”

“Fellow citizens, comrades!” he struck home with booming voice in his peroration, “we will lash ourselves together with hoops of steel, and go forth to avenge the outrages that have been committed. There is no power on earth that can keep us from our purpose!”

Some soldier started the song, “Keep the Home Fires Burning,” and the aliens of a little while before, many of them hardly knowing the English word, joined in, with lusty emphasis upon and new significance in the refrain,

“_Till the boys come home!_”

Down in Alabama, a government official at a similar session apostrophized Liberty in strident Polish, followed by a second lieutenant in similar vein, but in Italian; and even those of other tongues, including English, who could not understand the words, knew well enough or felt in their hearts the drift of it.

As has been said, some got across without naturalization, and one aftermath of that was an extraordinary scene in the Walter Reid Hospital at Washington. The opportunity returned to the wounded there, in dramatic guise. An orderly walked through the wards summoning all men who desired to become citizens to gather at once in the library, to be taken before the judge.

There was a scrambling from cots, men with missing limbs, lads with heavily bandaged faces, soldiers in every manner of hospital négligé. The thump of crutches was heard along the halls--more than a hundred answered the first call. When the officer in charge looked over the battered and motley assembly, saw the lame and helpless being assisted into motor vehicles for the journey to court, he gave an order designed to produce more formal dress for another occasion, but did not dampen the ardor of that going! And before the judge they held up their hands, or stumps of hands, and swore their fealty to the country to which already they had given better proof.

Out at Camp Zachary Taylor, near Louisville, Kentucky, is a great ash tree, now come to be known as “Naturalization Tree.” Its arms, in benediction, have been spread out over many hundreds of new citizens as they took the oath of allegiance and marched away upon their first American duty. That tree is for them a monument, a memorial of a Great Occasion.

In one of the Eastern camps three officers, helping the Naturalization Service in this business, looked up at one another in the spell of a common thought:

“Here we are, Major Schmidt, Captain Pulaski, and Lieutenant Martinelli”--such might have been their names; they were of races as various--“all of foreign birth, helping to make Americans!”

’Twas a pregnant thought, and it typified what was going on all over the country, in preparation for the “doing of great things together,” for the new nation’s acquisition of “a common glory in the past ... a will to do still greater things in the future.”

In the varied procession that passed on this errand before just one court came a Gentleman from Verona and a Merchant of Venice, as the judge himself styled them; a Filipino who had served two years in the Philippine constabulary; an Abyssinian count, born in Somaliland and claiming kinship to King Menelik and to speak twenty-seven languages. Then there was Dugga Ram, a Hindu, whom the judge made an exception to the rule against Asiatics; and the man from Russian Poland, who denied having any sovereign at all; the Armenian who said he would refuse citizenship if to get it he had to acknowledge himself a Turkish subject; the technically alien color sergeant who had served for years in the regular army and had been wounded in the Philippines.

An old soldier of the Civil War, still an alien in the eyes of the law, a Kentuckian seventy-six years old with a wife and six children, all born on this soil, and Americans beyond cavil, took advantage of the opportunity to file his tattered old army discharge of 1865 in lieu of “first papers.” There will be, till he dies, two Great Dates in that old fellow’s life--1861, when, like the aliens of this war, he pledged his life to maintain the United States, and 1918, when the United States formally accepted him into full recorded fealty and fellowship. Yet the _Fact_ had been a human reality for nearly sixty years!

There were not a few officers who had been commissioned in oversight of the fact that their alienage legally should have barred them. The defect was swiftly removed. And there were English and Irish and Scotch and Welsh--and others, too--who had been here so many years and were so saturated with all that is essential of Americanism that their naturalization seemed a formality almost absurdly superfluous.

To all of these at various times and under diverse conditions--sometimes in glaring noonday inbreaks of dreary camp routine; sometimes at night in the last hours before the grim setting forth for France--great words were spoken to solemnize and signalize the transaction. Perhaps the best of all was that tense sentence of General Bell:

_I beg of you not to take this oath of allegiance to the United States unless it is in your heart to do so._

Let it not be forgotten that nobody compelled these men to utilize this privilege. The law stipulated only that they “_may_ petition.” Their alienage would have exempted them from service and the peril that awaited them.

At first, the certificates of naturalization were delivered; but later, as the flood of applicants became overwhelming and the complications involved hurried departure overseas, before the papers were ready, and other considerations, the delivery was delayed, and the men were advised to arrange to have their precious “last papers” sent rather to their homes, or even retained in Washington until after the war. This was a deep disappointment to the new citizens; and at Camp Upton, for one example, a judge, who knew men by heart, caused the drawing up of a mimeographed temporary certificate, properly embellished with “SS,” “Be it known,” and all the rest of the imposing verbiage, with the soldier’s name suitably prominent in mid-page.

THOSE WHO WENT WITHOUT CITIZENSHIP

Many alien soldiers who were entitled to naturalization went overseas without having been naturalized; a large number before the permission had been made available. Many others, still in the cantonments, had not yet been reached by the process. The situation with regard to such of these as, on their discharge, took steps to get the citizenship to which they were entitled is suggested, even if not completely set forth, by the former chief examiner of one of the large districts, quoted by the Commissioner of Naturalization in his report for 1919:[147]

After the armistice a different situation arose. Many thousands of soldiers have been, are being, and for some time will be discharged who did not have the opportunity to be naturalized while in the service. The work in connection with their naturalization ... devolves solely upon the force of this service; ... the army is no longer in a position to render aid.... The demands upon the field-naturalization offices are so great that both civilian and soldier naturalization have had to suffer. Because of inability to furnish a sufficient allotment for additional clerical assistants in the office of the clerk of one of the largest naturalization courts in the United States, the clerk is able to care for but a small proportion of the soldier applicants as promptly as should be, and, under his present allowance, will be able to naturalize only approximately a half dozen daily. In another office of the clerk of a large naturalization court, civilians and honorably discharged soldiers are being turned away without receiving attention; and this is equally true in the field naturalization offices. So large a number of soldier applicants are coming into the field offices that in some it has become necessary to take the names and addresses of the applicants as they call and send notices to them at a future date when they can hope to have their applications attended to. Notices have also been inserted in the newspapers notifying them of the time they may appear, in order to save the time and expense of useless trips to the offices of examiners. It has also been necessary to close the doors of naturalization offices when the number of applicants admitted to offices constituted as many as could be accommodated. This has resulted in turning away from 100 to 150 soldiers and civilians daily in several cities. Because of insufficiency of appropriation, it has become necessary in one field office to limit the taking of civilian petitions for naturalization to only two days of the week in order to take care of the applications of honorably discharged soldiers.

These demands upon this service and the offices of the clerks of courts are so great that the government is being severely criticized for not providing facilities for both the discharged soldiers and civilian foreign born to take steps toward procuring their American citizenship to which they are justly entitled.

A GREAT COMPOSITE RECORD OF LOYALTY

Mr. Raymond F. Crist, then Director of Citizenship in the Bureau of Naturalization, pays a well-deserved tribute to the loyalty and the sacrifices of the foreign born, and points to the enhanced responsibility laid upon us by the service these men gave. In his report to the Commissioner of Naturalization,[148] “Concerning Americanization Activities,” Mr. Crist says, in part:

The names upon the roll of honor of the nation that were cabled back by the American Expeditionary Forces in France give emphatic testimony to the loyalty of the foreign born. The names on the rolls represent all European nationalities. So strongly in evidence were these names that they might well have been the rosters of the dead and wounded of any or all the European countries. The percentage of distinctly non-Anglo-Saxon names was exceedingly high. These lists still give mute testimony to the fact that the immigrant and the immigrant’s sons have laid down their lives for the land of their adoption. When the final records are computed they will undoubtedly show the presence in the military forces of our nation of the full quota of those of foreign birth. Their presence in our military and naval forces has worked a transformation with them. It has created an after-war debt and obligation upon the United States. The alien-born soldier has returned to America an educated and transformed individual. He is an American in all the senses.

Without intention to cavil or quibble about what Mr. Crist says--for what he says is essentially true--it is needful to remember that neither the stress of emotion under which these mass ceremonies at the camps were conducted, nor the act and fact of naturalization itself, nor yet, in any substantial way, the experiences in the army, could make new creatures of these men. They were afterward--they are now, especially in the chill reaction from the exuberance of that excited period--what they were before--“just folks”--good, bad, and indifferent, like the rest of us.

But there is this difference in what it means to them: They were _welcomed_ into citizenship without the heart-breaking, gnat-straining suspicion through which, in normal times, they would have had to go if they went at all. And no politician urged or herded them into voting status and power at any stage of it. For their American citizenship and share in the common sovereignty they are under obligation to nobody. They bought what they got, as it were, with their own blood.

What intellectual preparation or textbook schooling, what weary treading of red-tape labyrinth, what minute inspection by government functionary in zealous search for undotted or uncrossed letters in a seven-year-old document, would better test or attest an alien’s capacity for citizenship, or make his induction safer for Democracy?

Anyway, these men--those not dead on foreign fields as their first, and last, service to the flag--have gone back to their communities with a new status, and, we may hope, with a new sense of their relation to and responsibility for the nation’s welfare. It remains to be seen what use they and the rest of us will make of these new things.

X

THE FOREIGN-BORN WOMAN, HER HOME AND HER CHILDREN, IN AMERICAN POLITICS

The foreign-born woman plays directly in American politics a part somewhat, but not much, more important than that played by snakes in the zoölogy of Ireland. There are several reasons for this besides the fact that hitherto she has shared the legal disabilities common to her sex in the American political scheme--which fact, by itself, has now been largely mitigated by the final ratification of the Nineteenth (Woman Suffrage) Amendment to the Constitution of the United States; though even that applies only to the ballot, and has not removed either the legal or the general traditional limitations and inequities under which women, in most parts of the country, still abide. So far as the ballot is concerned, the American woman, native or naturalized, is now acknowledged to be an individual person.