Randolph S. Bourne, "Trans-national America,"
The Atlantic Monthly, 118:1 (July 1916), pp. 86-97.
NO reverberatory effect of the great war has caused American public opinion more
solicitude than the failure of the 'melting- pot.' The discovery of diverse
nationalistic feelings among our great alien population has come to most people
as an intense shock. It has brought out the unpleasant inconsistencies of our
traditional beliefs We have had to watch hard- hearted old Brahmins virtuously
indignant at the spectacle of the immigrant refusing to be melted, while they
jeer at patriots like Mary Antin who write about 'our forefathers.' We have had
to listen to publicists who express themselves as stunned by the evidence of
vigorous nationalistic and cultural movements in this country among Germans,
Scandinavians, Bohemians, and Poles, while in the same breath they insist that
the mien shall be forcibly assimilated to that Anglo- Saxon tradition which they
unquestioningly label 'American.'
As the unpleasant truth has come upon us that assimilation in this country was
proceeding on lines very different from those we had marked out for it, we found
ourselves inclined to blame those who were thwarting our prophecies. The truth
became culpable. We blamed the war, we blamed the Germans. And then we
discovered with a moral shock that these movements had been making great headway
before the war even began. We found that the tendency, reprehensible and
paradoxical as it might be, has been for the national clusters of immigrants, as
they became more and more firmly established and more and more prosperous, to
cultivate more and more assiduously the literatures and cultural traditions of
their homelands. Assimilation, in other words, instead of washing out the
memories of Europe, made them more and more intensely real. Just as these
clusters became more and more objectively American, did they become more and
more German or Scandinavian or Bohemian or Polish.
To face the fact that our aliens are already strong enough to take a share in
the direction of their own destiny, and that the strong cultural movements
represented by the foreign press, schools, and colonies are a challenge to our
facile attempts, is not, however, to admit the failure of Americanization. It is
not to fear the failure of democracy. It is rather to urge us to an
investigation of what Americanism may rightly mean. It is to ask ourselves
whether our ideal has been broad or narrow -- whether perhaps the time has not
come to assert a higher ideal than the 'melting- pot.' Surely we cannot be
certain of our spiritual democracy when, claiming to melt the nations within us
to a comprehension of our free and democratic institutions, we fly into panic at
the first sign of their own will and tendency. We act as if we wanted
Americanization to take place only on our own terms, and not by the consent of
the governed. All our elaborate machinery of settlement and school and union, of
social and political naturalization, however, will move with friction just in so
far as it neglects to take into account this strong and virile insistence that
America shall be what the immigrant will have a hand in making it, and not what
a ruling class, descendant of those British stocks which were the first
permanent immigrants, decide that America shall be made. This is the condition
which confronts us, and which demands a clear and general readjustment of our
attitude and our ideal.
I
MARY Antin is right when she looks upon our foreign- born as the people who
missed the Mayflower and came over on the first boat they could find. But she
forgets that when they did come it was not upon other Mayflower but upon a
'Fleur,' a 'Fleur de Mai,' a 'Fleur di Maggio,' a 'Majblomst.' These people were
not mere arrivals from the same family, to be welcomed as understood and
long-loved but strangers to the neighborhood, with whom a long process of
settling down had to take place. For they brought with them their national and
racial characters, and each new national quota had to wear slowly away the
contempt with which its mere alienness got itself greeted. Each had to make its
way slowly from the lowest strata of unskilled labor up to a level where it
satisfied the accredited norms of social success.
We are all foreign-born or the descendants of foreign-born,and if distinctions
are to be made between us, they should rightly be on some other ground than
indigenousness. The early colonists came over with motives no less colonial than
the later. They did not come to be assimilated in an American melting pot. They
did not come to adopt the culture of the American Indian. They had not the
smallest intention of 'giving themselves without reservation' to the new
country. They came to get freedom to live as they wanted to. They came to escape
from the stifling air and chaos of the old world; they came to make their
fortune in a new land. They invented no new social framework. Rather they
brought over bodily the old ways to which they had been accustomed. Tightly
concentrated on a hostile frontier, they were conservative beyond belief. Their
pioneer daring was reserved for the objective conquest of material resources. In
their folkways, in their social and political institutions, they were, like
every colonial people, slavishly imitative of the mother country. So that, in
spite of the 'Revolution,' our whole legal and political system remained more
English than the English, petrified and unchanging, while in England law
developed to meet the needs of the changing times.
It is just this English-American conservatism that has been our chief obstacle
to social advance. We have needed the new peoples -- the order of the German and
Scandinavian, the turbulence of the Slav and Hun -- to save us from our own
stagnation. I do not mean that the illiterate Slav is now the equal of the New
Englander of pure descent. He is raw material to be educated, not into a New
Englander, but into a socialized American along such lines as those thirty
nationalities are being educated in the amazing school of Gary. I do not believe
that this process is to be one of decades of evolution. The spectacle of Japan's
sudden jump from medievalism to post- modernism should have destroyed the
superstition. We are not dealing with individuals who are to 'evolve.' We are
dealing with their children, who with that education we are about to have, will
start level with all of us. Let us cease to think of ideals like democracy as
magical qualities inherent in certain peoples. Let us speak, not of inferior
races, but of inferior civilizations. We are all to educate and to be educated.
These peoples in America are in a common enterprise. It is not what we are now
that concerns us, but what this plastic next generation may become in the light
of a new cosmopolitan ideal.
We are not dealing with static factors, but with fluid and dynamic generations.
To contrast the older and the newer immigrants and see the one class as
democratically motivated by love of liberty, and the other by mere money-
getting, is not to illuminate the future. To think of earlier nationalities as
culturally assimilated to America, while we picture the later as a sodden and
resistive mass, makes only for bitterness and misunderstanding. There may be a
difference between these earlier and these later stocks, but it lies neither in
motive for coming nor in strength of cultural allegiance to the homeland. The
truth is that no more tenacious cultural allegiance to the mother country has
been shown by any alien nation than by the ruling class of Anglo- Saxon
descendants in these American States. English snobberies, English religion,
English literary styles, English literary reverences and canons, English ethics,
English superiorities, have been the cultural food that we have drunk in from
our mothers' breasts. The distinctively American spirit -- pioneer, as
distinguished from the reminiscently English -- that appears in Whitman and
Emerson and James, has had to exist on sufferance alongside of this other cult,
unconsciously belittled by our cultural makers of opinion. No country has
perhaps had so great indigenous genius which had so little influence on the
country's traditions and expressions. The unpopular and dreaded German- American
of the present day is a beginning amateur in comparison with those foolish
Anglophiles of Boston and New York and Philadelphia whose reversion to cultural
type sees uncritically in England's cause the cause of Civilization, and, under
the guise of ethical independence of thought, carries along European traditions
which are no more 'American' than the German categories themselves.
It speaks well for German- American innocence of heart or else for its lack of
imagination that it has not turned the hyphen stigma into a 'Tu quoque!' If
there were to be any hyphens scattered about, clearly they should be affixed to
those English descendants who had had centuries of time to be made American
where the German had had only half a century. Most significantly has the war
brought out of them this alien virus, showing them still loving English things,
owing allegiance to the English Kultur, moved by English shibboleths and
prejudice. It is only because it has been the ruling class in this country that
bestowed the epithet that we have not heard copiously and scornfully of
'hyphenated English Americans.' But even our quarrels with England have had the
bad temper, the extravagance, of family quarrels. The Englishman of to- day nags
us and dislikes us in that personal, peculiarly intimate way in which he
dislikes the Australian, or as we may dislike our younger brothers. He still
thinks of us incorrigibly as 'colonials.' America -- official, controlling,
literary, political America -- is still, as a writer recently expressed it,
'culturally speaking, a self- governing dominion of the British Empire.'
The non- English American can scarcely be blamed if he sometimes thinks of the
Anglo- Saxon predominance in America as little more than a predominance of
priority. The Anglo-Saxon was merely the first immigrant, the first to found a
colony. He has never really ceased to be the descendant of immigrants, nor has
he ever succeeded in transforming that colony into a real nation, with a
tenacious, richly woven fabric of native culture. Colonials from the other
nations have come and settled down beside him. They found no definite native
culture which should startle them out of their colonialism, and consequently
they looked back to their mother- country, as the earlier Anglo- Saxon immigrant
was looking back to his. What has been offered the newcomer has been the chance
to learn English, to become a citizen, to salute the flag. And those elements of
our ruling classes who are responsible for the public schools, the settlements,
all the organizations for amelioration in the cities, have every reason to be
proud of the care and labor which they ve devoted to absorbing the immigrant.
His opportunities the immigrant has taken to gladly, with almost pathetic
eagerness to make his way in the new land without friction or disturbance. The
common language has made not only for the necessary communication, but for all
the amenities of life.
If freedom means the right to do pretty much as one pleases, so long as one does
not interfere with others, the immigrant has found freedom, and the ruling
element has been singularly liberal in its treatment of the invading hordes. But
if freedom means a democratic cooperation in determining the ideals and purposes
and industrial and social institutions of a country, then the immigrant has not
been free, and Anglo- Saxon element is guilty of just what every dominant race
is guilty of in every European country: the imposition of its own culture upon
the minority peoples. The fact that this imposition has been so mild and,
indeed, semi- conscious does not alter its quality. And the war has brought out
just the degree to which that purpose of 'Americanizing,' that is, 'Anglo-Saxonizing,'
the immigrant has failed.
For the Anglo- Saxon now in his bitterness to turn upon the other peoples, talk
about their 'arrogance,' scold them for not being melted in a pot which never
existed, is to betray the unconscious purpose which lay at the bottom of his
heart. It betrays too the possession of a racial jealousy similar to that of
which he is now accusing the so called 'hyphenates.' Let the Anglo Saxon be
proud enough of the heroic toil and heroic sacrifices which moulded the nation.
But let him ask himself, if he had had to depend on the English descendants,
where he would have been living to- day. To those of us who see in the
exploitation of unskilled labor the strident red leit-motif of our civilization,
the settling of the country presents a great social drama as the waves of
immigration broke over it.
Let the Anglo- Saxon ask himself where he would have been if these races had not
come? Let those who feel the inferiority of the non- Anglo-Saxon immigrant
contemplate that region of the States which has remained the most distinctively
'American,' the South. Let him ask himself whether he would really like to see
the foreign hordes Americanized into such an Americanization. Let him ask
himself how superior this native civilization is to the great 'alien' states of
Wisconsin and Minnesota, where Scandinavians, Poles, and Germans have self-
consciously labored to preserve their traditional culture, while being outwardly
and satisfactorily American. Let him ask himself how much more wisdom,
intelligence, industry and social leadership has come out of these alien states
than out of all the truly American ones. The South, in fact, while this vast
Northern development has gone on, still remains an English colony, stagnant and
complacent, having progressed culturally scarcely beyond the early Victorian
era. It is culturally sterile because it has had no advantage of cross-
fertilization like the Northern states. What has happened in states such as
Wisconsin and Minnesota is that strong foreign cultures have struck root in a
new and fertile soil. America has meant liberation, and German and Scandinavian
political ideas and social energies have expanded to a new potency. The process
has not been at all the fancied 'assimilation' of the Scandinavian or Teuton.
Rather has it been a process of their assimilation of us -- I speak as an Anglo-
Saxon. The foreign cultures have not been melted down or run together, made into
some homogeneous Americanism, but have remained distinct but cooperating to the
greater glory and benefit not only of themselves but of all the native
'Americanism' around them.
What we emphatically do not want is that these distinctive qualities should be
washed out into a tasteless, colorless fluid of uniformity. Already we have far
too much of this insipidity, -- masses of people who are cultural half- breeds,
neither assimilated Anglo-Saxons nor nationals of another culture. Each national
colony in this country seems to retain in its foreign press, its vernacular
literature, its schools, its intellectual and patriotic leaders, a central
cultural nucleus. From this nucleus the colony extends out by imperceptible
gradations to a fringe where national characteristics are all but lost. Our
cities are filled with these half- breeds who retain their foreign names but
have lost the foreign savor. This does not mean that they have actually been
changed into New Englanders or MiddleWesterners. It does not mean that they have
been really Americanized. It means that, letting slip from them whatever native
culture they had, they have substituted for it only the most rudimentary
American -- the American culture of the cheap newspaper, the 'movies,' the
popular song, the ubiquitous automobile. The unthinking who survey this class
call them assimilated, Americanized. The great American public school has done
its work. With these people our institutions are safe. We may thrill with dread
at the aggressive hyphenate, but this tame flabbiness is accepted as
Americanization. The same moulders of opinion whose ideal is to melt the
different races into Anglo-Saxon gold hail this poor product as the satisfying
result of their alchemy.
Yet a truer cultural sense would have told us that it is not the self- conscious
cultural nuclei that sap at our American life, but these fringes. It is not the
Jew who sticks proudly to the faith of his fathers and boasts of that venerable
culture of his who is dangerous to America, but the Jew who has lost the Jewish
fire and become a mere elementary, grasping animal. It is not the Bohemian who
supports the Bohemian schools in Chicago whose influence is sinister, but the
Bohemian who has made money and has got into ward politics. Just so surely as we
tend to disintegrate these nuclei of nationalistic culture do we tend to create
hordes of men and women without a spiritual country, cultural outlaws, without
taste, without standards but those of the mob. We sentence them to live on the
most rudimentary planes of American life. The influences at the centre of the
nuclei are centripetal. They make for the intelligence and the social values
which mean an enhancement of life. And just because the foreign- born retains
this expressiveness is he likely to be a better citizen of the American
community. The influences at the fringe, however, are centrifugal, anarchical.
They make for detached fragments of peoples. Those who came to find liberty
achieve only license. They become the flotsam and jetsam of American life, the
downward undertow of our civilization with its leering cheapness and falseness
of taste and spiritual outlook, the absence of mind and sincere feeling which we
see in our slovenly towns, our vapid moving pictures, our popular novels, and in
the vacuous faces of the crowds on the city street. This is the cultural
wreckage of our time, and it is from the fringes of the Anglo- Saxon as well as
the other stocks that it falls. America has as yet no impelling integrating
force. It makes too easily for this detritus of cultures. In our loose, free
country, no constraining national purpose, no tenacious folk- tradition and
folk- style hold the people to a line.
The war has shown us that not in any magical formula will this purpose be found.
No intense nationalism of the European plan can be ours. But do we not begin to
see a new and more adventurous ideal? Do we not see how the national colonies in
America, deriving power from the deep cultural heart of Europe and yet living
here in mutual toleration, freed from the age-long tangles of races, creeds, and
dynasties, may work out a federated ideal? America is transplanted Europe, but a
Europe that has not been disintegrated and scattered in the transplanting as in
some Dispersion. Its colonies live here inextricably mingled, yet not
homogeneous. They merge but they do not fuse.
America is a unique sociological fabric, and it bespeaks poverty of imagination
not to be thrilled at the incalculable potentialities of so novel a union of
men. To seek no other goal than the weary old nationalism, -- belligerent,
exclusive, inbreeding, the poison of which we are witnessing now in Europe, --
is to make patriotism a hollow sham, and to declare that, in spite of our
boastings, America must ever be a follower and not a leader of nations.
II
IF we come to find this point of view plausible, we shall have to give up the
search for our native 'American' culture. With the exception of the South and
that New England which, like the Red Indian, seems to be passing into solemn
oblivion, there is no distinctively American culture. It is apparently our lot
rather to be a federation of cultures. This we have been for half a century, and
the war has made it ever more evident that this is what we are destined to
remain. This will not mean, however, that there are not expressions of
indigenous genius that could not have sprung from any other soil. Music, poetry,
philosophy, have been singularly fertile and new. Strangely enough, American
genius has flared forth just in those directions which are least understanded of
the people. If the American note is bigness, action, the objective as contrasted
with the reflective life, where is the epic expression of this spirit? Our drama
and our fiction, the peculiar fields for the expression of action and
objectivity, are somehow exactly the fields of the spirit which remain poor and
mediocre. American materialism is in some way inhibited from getting into
impressive artistic form its own energy with which it bursts. Nor is it any
better in architecture, the least romantic and subjective of all the arts. We
are inarticulate of the very values which we profess to idealize. But in the
finer forms -- music, verse, the essay, philosophy -- the American genius puts
forth work equal to any of its contemporaries. Just in so far as our American
genius has expressed the pioneer spirit, the adventurous, forward- looking drive
of a colonial empire, is it representative of that whole America of the many
races and peoples, and not of any partial or traditional enthusiasm. And only as
that pioneer note is sounded can we really speak of the American culture. As
long as we thought of Americanism in terms of the 'melting- pot,' our American
cultural tradition lay in the past. It was something to which the new Americans
were to be moulded. In the light of our changing ideal of Americanism, we must
perpetrate the paradox that our American cultural tradition lies in the future.
It will be what we all together make out of this incomparable opportunity of
attacking the future with a new key.
Whatever American nationalism turns out to be, it is certain to become something
utterly different from the nationalisms of twentieth- century Europe. This wave
of reactionary enthusiasm to play the orthodox nationalistic game which is
passing over the country is scarcely vital enough to last. We cannot swagger and
thrill to the same national self- feeling. We must give new edges to our pride.
We must be content to avoid the unnumbered woes that national patriotism has
brought in Europe, and that fiercely heightened pride and self- consciousness.
Alluring as this is, we must allow our imaginations to transcend this scarcely
veiled belligerency. We can be serenely too proud to fight if our pride embraces
the creative forces of civilization which armed contest nullifies. We can be too
proud to fight if our code of honor transcends that of the schoolboy on the
playground surrounded by his jeering mates. Our honor must be positive and
creative, and not the mere jealous and negative protectiveness against
metaphysical violations of our technical rights. When the doctrine is put forth
that in one American flows the mystic blood of all our country's sacred honor,
freedom, and prosperity, so that an injury to him is to be the signal for
turning our whole nation into that clan- feud of horror and reprisal which would
be war, then we find ourselves back among the musty schoolmen of the Middle
Ages, and not in any pragmatic and realistic America of the twentieth century.
We should hold our gaze to what America has done, not what medieval codes of
dueling she has failed to observe. We have transplanted European modernity to
our soil, without the spirit that inflames it and turns all its energy into
mutual destruction. Out of these foreign peoples there has somehow been squeezed
the poison. An America, 'hyphenated' to bitterness, is somehow non- explosive.
For, even if we all hark back in sympathy to a European nation, even if the war
has set every one vibrating to some emotional string twanged on the other side
of the Atlantic, the effect has been one of almost dramatic harmlessness.
What we have really been witnessing, however unappreciatively, in this country
has been a thrilling and bloodless battle of Kulturs. In that arena of friction
which has been the most dramatic -- between the hyphenated German- American and
the hyphenated English- American -- there have emerged rivalries of philosophies
which show up deep traditional attitudes, points of view which accurately
reflect the gigantic issues of the war. America has mirrored the spiritual
issues. The vicarious struggle has been played out peacefully here in the mind.
We have seen the stout resistiveness of the old moral interpretation of history
on which Victorian England thrived and made itself great in its own esteem. The
clean and immensely satisfying vision of the war as a contest between right and
wrong; the enthusiastic support of the Allies as the incarnation of virtue- on-
a- rampage; the fierce envisaging of their selfish national purposes as the
ideals of justice, freedom and democracy -- all this has been thrown with
intensest force against the German realistic interpretations in terms of the
struggle for power and the virility of the integrated State. America has been
the intellectual battleground of the nations.
III
THE failure of the melting- pot, far from closing the great American democratic
experiment, means that it has only just begun. Whatever American nationalism
turns out to be, we see already that it will have a color richer and more
exciting than our ideal has hitherto encompassed. In a world which has dreamed
of internationalism, we find that we have all unawares been building up the
first international nation. The voices which have cried for a tight and jealous
nationalism of the European pattern are failing. From that ideal, however
valiantly and disinterestedly it has been set for us, time and tendency have
moved us further and further away. What we have achieved has been rather a
cosmopolitan federation of national colonies, of foreign cultures, from whom the
sting of devastating competition has been removed. America is already the
world-federation in miniature, the continent where for the first time in history
has been achieved that miracle of hope, the peaceful living side by side, with
character substantially preserved, of the most heterogeneous peoples under the
sun. Nowhere else has such contiguity been anything but the breeder of misery.
Here, notwithstanding our tragic failures of adjustment, the outlines are
already too clear not to give us a new vision and a new orientation of the
American mind in the world.
It is for the American of the younger generation to accept this cosmopolitanism,
and carry it along with selfconscious and fruitful purpose. In his colleges, he
is already getting, with the study of modern history and politics, the modern
literatures, economic geography, the privilege of a cosmopolitan outlook such as
the people of no other nation of to- day in Europe can possibly secure. If he is
still a colonial, he is no longer the colonial of one partial culture, but of
many. He is a colonial of the world. Colonialism has grown into cosmopolitanism,
and his mother land is no one nation, but all who have anything life- enhancing
to offer to the spirit. That vague sympathy which the France of ten years ago
was feeling for the world -- a sympathy which was drowned in the terrible
reality of war -- may be the modern American's, and that in a positive and
aggressive sense. If the American is parochial, it is in sheer wantonness or
cowardice. His provincialism is the measure of his fear of bogies or the defect
of his imagination.
Indeed, it is not uncommon for the eager Anglo- Saxon who goes to a vivid
American university to- day to find his true friends not among his own race but
among the acclimatized German or Austrian, the acclimatized Jew, the
acclimatized Scandinavian or Italian. In them he finds the cosmopolitan note. In
these youths, foreign- born or the children of foreign- born parents, he is
likely to find many of his old inbred morbid problems washed away. These friends
are oblivious to the repressions of that tight little society in which he so
provincially grew up. He has a pleasurable sense of liberation from the stale
and familiar attitudes of those whose ingrowing culture has scarcely created
anything vital for his America of to- day. He breathes a larger air. In his new
enthusiasms for continental literature, for unplumbed Russian depths, for French
clarity of thought, for Teuton philosophies of power, he feels himself citizen
of a larger world. He may be absurdly superficial, his outward- reaching wonder
may ignore all the stiller and homelier virtues of his Anglo- Saxon home, but he
has at least found the clue to that international mind which will be essential
to all men and women of good- will if they are ever to save this Western world
of ours from suicide. His new friends have gone through a similar evolution.
America has burned most of the baser metal also from them. Meeting now with this
common American background, all of them may yet retain that distinctiveness of
their native cultures and their national spiritual slants. They are more
valuable and interesting to each other for being different, yet that difference
could not be creative were it not for this new cosmopolitan outlook which
America has given them and which they all equally possess.
A college where such a spirit is possible even to the smallest degree, has
within itself already the seeds of this international intellectual world of the
future. It suggests that the contribution of America will be an intellectual
internationalism which goes far beyond the mere exchange of scientific ideas and
discoveries and the cold recording of facts. It will be an intellectual sympathy
which is not satisfied until it has got at the heart of the different cultural
expressions, and felt as they feel. It may have immense preferences, but it will
make understanding and not indignation its end. Such a sympathy will unite and
not divide.
Against the thinly disguised panic which calls itself 'patriotism' and the
thinly disguised militarism which calls itself 'preparedness' the cosmopolitan
ideal is set. This does not mean that those who hold it are for a policy of
drift. They, too, long passionately for an integrated and disciplined America.
But they do not want one which is integrated only for domestic economic
exploitation of the workers or for predatory economic imperialism among the
weaker peoples. They do not want one that is integrated by coercion or
militarism, or for the truculent assertion of a medieval code of honor and of
doubtful rights. They believe that the most effective integration will be one
which coordinates the diverse elements and turns them consciously toward working
out together the place of America in the world- situation. They demand for
integration a genuine integrity, a wholeness and soundness of enthusiasm and
purpose which can only come when no national colony within our America feels
that it is being discriminated against or that its cultural case is being
prejudged. This strength of cooperation, this feeling that all who are here may
have a hand in the destiny of America, will make for a finer spirit of
integration than any narrow 'Americanism' or forced chauvinism.
In this effort we may have to accept some form of that dual citizenship which
meets with so much articulate horror among us. Dual citizenship we may have to
recognize as the rudimentary form of that international citizenship to which, if
our words mean anything, we aspire. We have assumed unquestioningly that mere
participation in the political life of the United States must cut the new
citizen off from all sympathy with his old allegiance. Anything but a bodily
transfer of devotion from one sovereignty to another has been viewed as a sort
of moral treason against the Republic. We have insisted that the immigrant whom
we welcomed escaping from the very exclusive nationalism of his European home
shall forthwith adopt a nationalism just as exclusive, just as narrow, and even
less legitimate because it is founded on no warm traditions of his own. Yet a
nation like France is said to permit a formal and legal dual citizenship even at
the present time. Though a citizen of hers may pretend to cast off his
allegiance in favor of some other sovereignty, he is still subject to her laws
when he returns. Once a citizen, always a citizen, no matter how many new
citizenships he may embrace. And such a dual citizenship seems to us sound and
right. For it recognizes that, although the Frenchman may accept the formal
institutional framework of his new country and indeed become intensely loyal to
it, yet his Frenchness he will never lose. What makes up the fabric of his soul
will always be of this Frenchness, so that unless he becomes utterly degenerate
he will always to some degree dwell still in his native environment.
Indeed, does not the cultivated American who goes to Europe practice a dual
citizenship, which, if not formal, is no less real? The American who lives
abroad may be the least expatriate of men. If he falls in love with French ways
and French thinking and French democracy and seeks to saturate himself with the
new spirit, he is guilty of at least a dual spiritual citizenship. He may be
still American, yet he feels himself through sympathy also a Frenchman. And he
finds that this expansion involves no shameful conflict within him, no surrender
of his native attitude. He has rather for the first time caught a glimpse of the
cosmopolitan spirit. And after wandering about through many races and
civilizations he may return to America to find them all here living vividly and
crudely, seeking the same adjustment that he made. He sees the new peoples here
with a new vision. They are no longer masses of aliens, waiting to be
'assimilated,' waiting to be melted down into the indistinguishable dough of
Anglo- Saxonism. They are rather threads of living and potent cultures, blindly
striving to weave themselves into a novel international nation, the first the
world has seen. In an Austria-Hungary or a Prussia the stronger of these
cultures would be moving almost instinctively to subjugate the weaker. But in
America those wills- to- power are turned in a different direction into learning
how to live together.
Along with dual citizenship we shall have to accept, I think, that free and
mobile passage of the immigrant between America and his native land again which
now arouses so much prejudice among us. We shall have to accept the immigrant's
return for the same reason that we consider justified our own flitting about the
earth. To stigmatize the alien who works in America for a few years and returns
to his own land, only perhaps to seek American fortune again, is to think in
narrow nationalistic terms. It is to ignore the cosmopolitan significance of
this migration. It is to ignore the fact that the returning immigrant is often a
missionary to an inferior civilization.
This migratory habit has been especially common with the unskilled laborers who
have been pouring into the United States in the last dozen years from every
country in southeastern Europe. Many of them return to spend their earnings in
their own country or to serve their country in war. But they return with an
entirely new critical outlook, and a sense of the superiority of American
organization to the primitive living around them. This continued passage to and
fro has already raised the material standard of labour in many regions of these
backward countries. For these regions are thus endowed with exactly what they
need, the capital for the exploitation of their natural resources, and the
spirit of enterprise. America is thus educating these laggard peoples from the
very bottom of society up, awaking vast masses to a new- born hope for the
future. In the migratory Greek, therefore, we have not the parasitic alien, the
doubtful American asset, but a symbol of that cosmopolitan interchange which is
coming, in spite of all war and national exclusiveness.
Only America, by reason of the unique liberty of opportunity and traditional
isolation for which she seems to stand, can lead in this cosmopolitan
enterprise. Only the American -- and in this category I include the migratory
alien who has lived with us and caught the pioneer spirit and a sense of new
social vistas -- has the chance to become that citizen of the world. America is
coming to be, not a nationality but a trans- nationality, a weaving back and
forth, with the other lands, of many threads of all sizes and colors. Any
movement which attempts to thwart this weaving, or to dye the fabric any one
color, or disentangle the threads of the strands, is false to this cosmopolitan
vision. I do not mean that we shall necessarily glut ourselves with the raw
product of humanity. It would be folly to absorb the nations faster than we
could weave them. We have no duty either to admit or reject. It is purely a
question of expediency. What concerns us is the fact that the strands are here.
We must have a policy and an ideal for an actual situation. Our question is,
What shall we do with our America? How are we likely to get the more creative
America -- by confining our imaginations to the ideal of the melting- pot, or
broadening them to some such cosmopolitan conception as I have been vaguely
sketching?
The war has shown America to be unable, though isolated geographically and
politically from a European world-situation, to remain aloof and irresponsible.
She is a wandering star in a sky dominated by two colossal constellations of
states. Can she not work out some position of her own, some life of being in,
yet not quite of, this seething and embroiled European world? This is her only
hope and promise. A trans- nationality of all the nations, it is spiritually
impossible for her to pass into the orbit of any one. It will be folly to hurry
herself into a premature and sentimental nationalism, or to emulate Europe and
play fast and loose with the forces that drag into war. No Americanization will
fulfill this vision which does not recognize the uniqueness of this trans-
nationalism of ours. The Anglo- Saxon attempt to fuse will only create enmity
and distrust. The crusade against 'hyphenates' will only inflame the partial
patriotism of trans-nationals, and cause them to assert their European
traditions in strident and unwholesome ways. But the attempt to weave a wholly
novel international nation out of our chaotic America will liberate and
harmonize the creative power of all these peoples and give them the new
spiritual citizenship, as so many individuals have already been given, of a
world.
Is it a wild hope that the undertow of opposition to metaphysics in
international relations, opposition to militarism, is less a cowardly
provincialism than a groping for this higher cosmopolitan ideal? One can
understand the irritated restlessness with which our proud pro- British
colonists contemplate a heroic conflict across the seas in which they have no
part. It was inevitable that our necessary inaction should evolve in their minds
into the bogey of national shame and dishonor. But let us be careful about
accepting their sensitiveness as final arbiter. Let us look at our reluctance
rather as the first crude beginnings of assertion on the part of certain strands
in our nationality that they have a right to a voice in the construction of the
American ideal. Let us face realstically the America we have around us. Let us
work with the forces that are at work. Let us make something of this trans-
national spirit instead of outlawing it. Already we are living this cosmopolitan
America. What we need is everywhere a vivid consciousness of the new ideal.
Deliberate headway must be made against the survivals of the melting pot ideal
for the promise of American life.
We cannot Americanize America worthily by sentimentalizing and moralizing
history. When the best schools are expressly renouncing the questionable duty of
teaching patriotism by means of history, it is not the time to force shibboleth
upon the immigrant. This form of Americanization has been heard because it
appealed to the vestiges of our old sentimentalized and moralized patriotism.
This has so far held the field as the expression of the new American's new
devotion. The inflections of other voices have been drowned. They must be heard.
We must see if the lesson of the war has not been for hundreds of these later
Americans a vivid realization of their trans- nationality, a new consciousness
of what America meant to them as a citizenship in the world. It is the vague
historic idealisms which have provided the fuel for the European flame. Our
American ideal can make no progress until we do away with this romantic gilding
of the past.
All our idealisms must be those of future social goals in which all can
participate, the good life of personality lived in the environment of the
Beloved Community. No mere doubtful triumphs of the past, which redound to the
glory of only one of our transnationalities, can satisfy us. It must be a future
America, on which all can unite, which pulls us irresistibly toward it, as we
understand each other more warmly.
To make real this striving amid dangers and apathies is work for a younger
intelligentsia of America. Here is an enterprise of integration into which we
can all pour ourselves, of a spiritual welding which should make us, if the
final menace ever came, no weaker, but infinitely strong.
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