Part 8
For the last fifty years certain Germans have preached a boundless cosmopolitanism, while the German people have practiced an intense ingrowing racialism. It is, of course, true that these men who preached it were themselves rebels against the German system. Karl Marx, Lasselle, Engels, helped to found an international movement in protest against the form of nationality within which they lived. But the direction and violence of their rebound were governed by the hard surface from which they recoiled. The personality of these men and the tonic value of their thought have been of inestimable benefit to our age. In their main position they were much nearer the truth than their opponents. But the precise point I am dealing with is their theory of cosmopolitanism. And here a grievous personal experience in a cramping environment misled these early radicals, and they incorporated in their program the anti-national item which did not belong. Because their analysis of conditions was in the main so searching, so just, their thought has continued to exercise a profound influence, and the animating ideas in their philosophy of history and in their analysis of industrialism were imported to England and to America. The stern and unbending leaders of socialist thought have reproduced their masters' voice with an almost unchanged accent. A few great Russians contributed to the same theory of cosmopolitanism, and have powerfully affected groups of modern thinkers. I doubt if any single idea has traveled further and more swiftly than this idea that the sense of nationality is a mistaken thing, and that a something wider and vaguer is the goal of the future. The Latin races have sometimes thought they believed it, but they quickly corrected their thinking under the impact of event.
Our present school of softened, daintily stepping radicals have whittled away some of the original doctrine of the class war. The materialistic theory of history, surplus value and the proletarian division have had to yield in part to the facts of the case. But the modern reformers cling to that creation of German and Russian thought, a cosmopolitan world, the merging of races and nations into a universal undifferentiated brotherhood with gradually disappearing boundaries. We find it in our intelligent skilled social workers. I mention them in no unfriendliness, but because I believe that they and their group are a noble influence in our country, and because their blindness and failure in this crisis are a grief to me and to thousands of other persons who have looked to them for leadership. We find this idea of cosmopolitanism in the modern essayists, who are read in America, like Lowes Dickinson, Bertrand Russell, and Bernard Shaw. This doctrine has misled our social workers, our socialists, our radicals in social reform, our feminists--almost every element in our social movement. Our American radicalism is permeated with a vague cosmopolitanism, and its child, pacifism. At no point has "modern" thought exercised a profounder effect than on our social movement.
We need the check here of the Latin mentality. The clear Latin mind refuses to be misled by idealistic phrases, whose meaning does not permit of analysis into concrete terms. The French and Italians have recognized that the contribution of nationality is vital to the future. Their conception of social change is healthier than ours. It is Mazzini and not Karl Marx who was the prophet of a sane evolution. Mazzini says:
"Every people has its special mission, which will co-operate towards the fulfillment of the general mission of Humanity. That mission constitutes its nationality. Nationality is sacred.
"In laboring, according to true principles, for our country we are laboring for humanity. Our country is the fulcrum of the lever which we have to wield for the common good. If we give up this fulcrum, we run the risk of becoming useless both to our country and to humanity.
"Do not be led away by the idea of improving your material conditions without first solving the national question. You cannot do it.
"Country is not a mere zone of territory. The true country is the idea to which it gives birth." It is "A common principle, recognized, accepted, and developed by all."
His thought is clear and consistent. How shall a man serve all humanity whom he has not seen, if he does not serve his nation whom he has seen? "The individual is too insignificant, and humanity too vast." The stuff of nationality is the sacrifice rendered by the people to realize their aspirations--"By the memory of our former greatness, by the sufferings of the millions." The limits of nationality will tend toward natural boundaries--the division of
"humanity into distinct groups or nuclei upon the face of the earth, thus creating the germ of nationalities. Evil governments have disfigured the divine design. Nevertheless you may still trace it, distinctly marked out--as least as far as Europe is concerned--by the course of the great rivers, the direction of the higher mountains, and other geographical conditions. They (the Governments) have disfigured it so far that, if we except England and France, there is not perhaps a single country whose present boundaries correspond to that design. Natural divisions, and the spontaneous, innate tendencies of the peoples, will take the place of the arbitrary divisions sanctioned by evil governments. The map of Europe will be redrawn.
"Then may each one of you, fortified by the power and the affection of many millions, all speaking the same language, gifted with the same tendencies, and educated by the same historical tradition, hope, even by your own single effort, to be able to benefit all Humanity. O my brothers, love your Country! Our Country is our Home, the house that God has given us, placing therein a numerous family that loves us, and whom we love; a family with whom we sympathize more readily, and whom we understand more quickly than we do others; and which, from its being centered round a given spot, and from the homogeneous nature of its elements, is adapted to a special branch of activity."
The method of strengthening the sense of nationality is by education. "Every citizen should receive in the national schools a moral education, a course of nationality--comprising a summary view of the progress of humanity and of the history of his own country; a popular exposition of the principles directing the legislation of that country."
That Mazzini's ideas are a living force to-day is proved by the response of the nations in this war. In the seaside town of Hove, Sussex, where I live, his book, developing these ideas, was drawn out from the public library thirty-eight times in the last four years.
There is a danger here of over-stressing nationality and inviting a return to the anarchy of war, and this is the difficulty one has in pointing out the psychologic unsoundness of Cosmopolitanism. The limitations of the Mazzini theory have been convincingly drawn by Graham Wallas.
"Nationalism, as interpreted either by Bismarck ("We must not swallow more than we can digest") or by Mazzini, played a great and invaluable part in the development of the political consciousness of Europe during the nineteenth century. But it is becoming less and less possible to accept it as a solution for the problems of the twentieth century."
Wallas shows that Mazzini enormously exaggerated the simplicity of the question. National types are not divided into homogeneous units "by the course of the great rivers and the direction of the high mountains," but are intermingled from village to village. Do the Balkan mountains represent the purposes of God in Macedonia? And for which nationality, Greek or Bulgar? The remedy, as Wallas sees it, for recurring war between nations is an international science of eugenics which might "indicate that the various races should aim, not at exterminating each other, but at encouraging the improvement by each of its own racial type." In this way the emotion of political solidarity can be slowly made possible between individuals of consciously different national types. A political emotion, if it is to do away with war, cannot be created by thwarting the instinct of nationality. It must be based, "not upon a belief in the likeness of individual human beings, but upon the recognition of their unlikeness." We in America have tried to deny the facts of psychology by calling all our newcomers Americans. We have sought to escape our problem by shutting our eyes to the infinite dissimilarity of the individuals in our population. The only direction for hope to travel is that the improvement of the whole species will come rather from "a conscious world-purpose based upon a recognition of the value of racial as well as individual variety than from mere fighting." This is the true internationalism, and it differs as widely from a cosmopolitan blur which "makes" Americans as from the bitter enforced nationality of blood and iron, or spiritual imperial arrogance.
I have found a perfectly clear statement of what lies loosely in the mind of modern Americans of mixed race and intense pre-occupation with the game of getting on. I have found it in the editorial columns of a Middle Western paper. The Cedar Rapids _Gazette_ says:
EXTINCT AMERICANS
"The authorities who fear that the American race will 'die out' may not have noticed that all the ingredients of that race are still being born in Europe at about the usual rate. And, at the worst, if one American race dies out there will be another race as good or better in America to take its place.
"Several American races have already died to the extent that the members are no longer to be separately identified and their distinctive ideas no longer exert influence on the county. Among the vanished races are the Pilgrims, the Puritans, the Cavaliers, the Huguenots, the Acadian voyagers, the Knickerbockers, the Pennsylvania and New Jersey Dutch, the pioneer forest tribes of Kentucky, Ohio and southern Indiana, the picturesque Yankee, the southeastern Cracker, the typical Plainsman and Cowboy, each of whom in his time and place was the representative of a small and distinct nationality.
"The Americans of two generations are unlike. To use an Irish epigram, change is the only established characteristic of the American. The American in whose veins flows the blood of half a dozen European races, whose grandparents may have been born in four states, his parents in two states; whose wife may have been born in a state other than his own and whose four children may be married to men and women of four nationalities, is not worrying greatly regarding the exact composition of the 'American race.' Individually he has on hand a rather complete stock of the ingredients and is satisfied with the idea that he is doing his best to help establish a representative order of humanity.
"There is no need to worry about the passing of a race. The world and humanity are the big ideas. The race that deserves to die will pass. The race that fights for its existence, whose members have pride in their kind, will live. A race is recruited only through the cradle. A race that disregards its young is doomed. But mankind will not be less numerous and that which is of value will survive. Not only the end of the race, but the end of the world is in sight for those who leave no children to perpetuate their bodies and their minds."
The trouble with that is that it is devoid of self-respect. It gives no foundation for ethics. It gives no sanction for religion. It gives no soil and roots for literature. It treats the life of man as if it were grass to flourish and perish. It treats men as mechanical units in a political and industrial system. They go to their lathe in the factory, attend a motion-picture show in the evening, and so on for a few years to dissolution. It is pessimistic with a dark annihilating quality. And it is a habit of mind that is growing among us. It is the inevitable reflex of our bright surface optimism, which drowns thought in speed and change, and believes that activity under scientific direction can satisfy the human spirit.
Actually the stock we came of matters very much--for ourselves. Being dead, it yet lives, and we are the channel of its ongoing. Only by using the inheritance that comes to us can we lead the life of the mind in art and ethics and religion. "Huckleberry Finn," "The Virginian," "Still Jim," "The Valley of the Moon," and "Ethan Frome," possess a permanence of appeal precisely because they are rooted in the sense of nationality, and are a natural growth out of a tradition. Each story describes a vanishing race, and deals with a locality assailed by change. Each is a momentary arrest in time of an ebbing tide. Each has the unconscious pathos of a last stand. But not one of these books would have carried beyond the day of its appearance if it had dealt with a life-history removed from its long inheritance. It is only so that the nations among us will in time produce their literature. It will not be by surface types of "rapid" Americans. It will rather be by rendering the individual (whether Jew or Bohemian) in all the loneliness of crowds and modern cities, and revealing the thoughts and "notions" and desires that have come down to him from his very ancient past, and his little ripple of activity in the endless stream of descent. Montague Glass and Joseph Hergesheimer and Fannie Hurst are aware of this necessity of relating their art to the instinctive life of their character, and so under the brightest crackle of their American smartness something goes echoing back to a day that is older than the Coney Island and Broadway and Atlantic City of their setting. Joseph Stella in his drawings has shown perception of this by anchoring his type in its inherited life, and his steel workers are better than many reports of Mr. Gary on how it is with America at the Pittsburgh blast furnaces.
But not only is the sense of nationality needed for the finer activities of the mind. There is need of it in "practical" politics. It is discouraging that our American social movement has been captured by cosmopolitanism. For the immediate future lies with radical changes in the world of environment. Living conditions are going to be improved. A greater measure of equality will be achieved in our own time. But how is the social change inside the country to be related to other States? What shall be our foreign policy? This is where the cosmopolitanism of our radical group is a poor guide for action. It is the vice of liberals that they don't harness their ideas to facts. The result is that at time of crisis the power slips over in the hands of Tory reactionaries. We have seen a recent instance in England, where the liberals shirked the war during the premonitory years. As the result, the good old stand-pat crowd of Tories came in with a rush, simply because on foreign policy they had a program which at least dealt with the facts of the case.
Until liberals are willing to think through on foreign policy, studying European and world history, defining the meaning of the State and visualizing its relationship to other States, we shall have a skimmed-milk pacifism as their largest contribution to the problems of nation-States, submerged nationalities, backward races, exploitable territory and international straits, canals and ports of call. That is unfortunate. For, unless the liberal mind is brought to bear on foreign policy, we shall continue to have that policy manipulated by little groups of expert imperialists. These inner cliques present a program of action based on fact-study, which wins public opinion, because the instinct of the people trusts men who know what they want more than it trusts a bland benevolence without direction of aim.
Our social workers and other liberals would not think of advocating a policy of "Christianizing" the employer as the sole remedy for social maladjustment. But this is precisely the sort of thing they advocate in inter-State relationship. They seek to work by spiritual conversion, turning the hearts of the rulers to righteousness and softening the mood of the bellicose mass-people. And the chaos of the outer world will continue to pour into our tight little domestic compartments of nicely-adjusted social relationships.
In a word, foreign policy and domestic policy are of one piece, and the same realism must be applied to questions like the neutrality of Belgium and the internationalization of Constantinople which we apply to wage-scales. Until men of liberal tendency are willing to devote the same hard study to the map which they put on social reform and internal development, the world will continue to turn to its only experts on foreign policy, who unfortunately are largely imperialists.
V
THE HYPHENATES
A famous American president once said to a distinguished ambassador:
"We make them into Americans. They come in immigrants of all nationalities, but they rapidly turn into Americans and make one nation."
And the ambassador thought within himself and later said to me:
"But a nation is a people with a long experience, who have lived and suffered together. There is a bell in a great church, which if you lightly flick it with the fingernail, gives out one single tone which goes echoing through the Cathedral. If you stand at the far end, you can hear that tone. So it is with a nation. If it is struck, it responds as one man to its furthest border. At the stroke of crisis it answers with one tone."
No. We are not a nation. We are a bundle of nationalities, and some day we shall be a Commonwealth if we deal wisely with these nations who dwell among us.
We cannot "make" Americans. We can make "imitation Americans," as Alfred Zimmern calls them. The Jew, spiritually sensitive and intellectually acute, becomes an "amateur Gentile." The imaginative Calabrian, of rich social impulse, becomes a flashily dressed Padrone. The poetic, religious Irishman, whose instinct has been communal for many centuries, becomes a district leader. These individuals have come to us with rare and charming gifts, fruit of their nationality. Instead of frankly accepting them in their inheritance, we have applied a hasty conversion which denied their life of inherited impulses and desires. Instead of bringing out the good in them, we have Americanized them into commercial types.
Where does our future lie?
It lies in developing and making use of men like the great Jews, Abram Jacobi, Charles Proteus Steinmetz and Louis Brandeis, who are true to their own nature, and who respond to the American environment. These men are not amateur Gentiles. They are Jews and they are Americans. It lies in Italians like Dr. Stella, who love those elements in Italy which are liberal, and who further every effort in America to create free institutions. We need the help of every man of them to save our country from commercialism.
Recently I asked one of the most brilliant of living scholars, of German descent, to give me his views on the future in America. He wrote:
"What is America to do? I should answer: preach hyphenation. Make the common man realize that nationality is a spiritual force which has in essence as little to do with government as religion has. When government interferes with freedom of worship, religion comes into politics and stays there till its course is unimpeded. The same is true of nationality--in Ireland, in East Europe and elsewhere. But that is only an accident. To allow governments to exploit for political ends the huge inarticulate emotional driving force of either religion or nationality is to open the floodgates. Hence the wars of religion in the Seventeenth Century and the nationalist hatreds of the present war."
Alfred Zimmern says:
"It seems strange that there should be Americans who still hold firmly to the old-fashioned view of what I can only call instantaneous conversion, of the desirability and possibility of the immigrant shedding his whole ancestral inheritance and flinging himself into the melting-pot of transatlantic life to emerge into a clean white American soul of the brand approved by the Pilgrim Fathers. Now the only way to teach immigrants how to become good Americans, that is to say, how to be good in America, is by appealing to that in them which made them good in Croatia, or Bohemia, or Poland, or wherever they came from. And by far the best and the most useful leverage for this purpose is the appeal to nationality: because nationality is more than a creed or a doctrine or a code of conduct, it is an instinctive attachment."
The road to sound Internationalism, to an understanding between States, lies "through Nationalism, not through leveling men down to a gray, indistinctive Cosmopolitanism but by appealing to the best elements in the corporate inheritance of each nation." True democracy wishes to use the best that is in men in all their infinite diversity, not to melt away their difference into one economic man. The American passion for uniformity, for creating a "snappy," efficient, undifferentiated type, is merely the local and recent form of the rigid aristocratic desire to "Christianize" the Jew, to Anglicize Ireland, to modernize the Hindu. It is the wish to make man in our own image. It is the last bad relic of the missionary zeal which conducted the Inquisition. It is only subtler and more dangerous, because persecution called out hidden powers of resistance, but triumphant Commercialism, as engineered by our industrial oligarchy, calls out imitation.
I have a collection of photographs made at Ellis Island by Julian Dimock. They are subjects chosen almost at random from the stream of newcomers on the morning of ship-arrival. There is often something very touching in the expression of these faces: a trust in the goodness of life, in the goodness of human nature. Man and woman and youth, they seem to carry something that has been won by long generations of rooted life and passed on to them for safe-keeping. And suddenly at the landing in the new world the tradition is touched to a dream of hope. But that light never lasts for long. Watch those same newcomers as they are disgorged from our city factories. How soon the light goes out of their faces, the inhabiting spirit withdrawn to its own inaccessible home. Something brisk and natty and pert replaces that unconscious dignity. Something tired from unceasing surface stimulus takes possession of what was fresh and innocent in open peasant life and the friendly intercourse of neighbors.