TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE

Footnote anchors are denoted by [number], and the footnotes have been placed at the end of the book. Many of the Tables have associated footnotes, which have been kept at the bottom of that table and labelled as a ‘note’ rather than a footnote. These note anchors are denoted by {number}.

Some Tables were very wide; these have been split into two parts, with the first column of the first part being repeated in the other part. On handheld devices some Tables may need to be viewed in a small font to see all the columns.

In those Tables with ‘court number’ from 1 to 29 as a header, court number 11 is always missing; this is not an error, it is absent in the original text.

Some other minor changes to the text are noted at the [end of the book.]

AMERICANS BY CHOICE

Americanization Studies

Schooling of the Immigrant.
Frank V. Thompson, Supt. of Public Schools, Boston

America via the Neighborhood.
John Daniels

Old World Traits Transplanted.
Robert E. Park, Professorial Lecturer, University of Chicago
Herbert A. Miller, Professor of Sociology, Oberlin College

A Stake in the Land.
Peter A. Speek, in charge, Slavic Section, Library of Congress

Immigrant Health and the Community.
Michael M. Davis, Jr., Director, Boston Dispensary

New Homes for Old.
Sophonisba P. Breckinridge, Professor of Social Economy, University of Chicago

The Immigrant Press and Its Control.
Robert E. Park, Professorial Lecturer, University of Chicago

Adjusting Immigrant and Industry. (In preparation)
William M. Leiserson, Chairman, Labor Adjustment Boards, Rochester and New York

Americans by Choice.
John P. Gavit, Vice-President, New York Evening Post

The Immigrant’s Day in Court. (In press)
Kate Holladay Claghorn, Instructor in Social Research, New York School of Social Work

Summary. (In preparation)
Allen T. Burns, Director, Studies in Methods of Americanization

Harper & Brothers Publishers

AMERICANIZATION STUDIES

ALLEN T. BURNS, DIRECTOR

AMERICANS
BY CHOICE

BY

JOHN PALMER GAVIT

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS

NEW YORK AND LONDON

1922

Americans By Choice

Copyright, 1922
By Harper & Brothers
Printed in the U. S. A.

First Edition

G—W

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

The material in this volume was gathered by the Division of Health Standards and Care of Studies in Methods of Americanization.

Americanization in this study has been considered as the union of native and foreign born in all the most fundamental relationships and activities of our national life. For Americanization is the uniting of new with native-born Americans in fuller common understanding and appreciation to secure by means of self-government the highest welfare of all. Such Americanization should perpetuate no unchangeable political, domestic, and economic regime delivered once for all to the fathers, but a growing and broadening national life, inclusive of the best wherever found. With all our rich heritages, Americanism will develop best through a mutual giving and taking of contributions from both newer and older Americans in the interest of the commonweal. This study has followed such an understanding of Americanization.

FOREWORD

This volume is the result of studies in methods of Americanization prepared through funds furnished by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. It arose out of the fact that constant applications were being made to the Corporation for contributions to the work of numerous agencies engaged in various forms of social activity intended to extend among the people of the United States the knowledge of their government and their obligations to it. The trustees felt that a study which should set forth, not theories of social betterment, but a description of the methods of the various agencies engaged in such work, would be of distinct value to the cause itself and to the public.

The outcome of the study is contained in eleven volumes on the following subjects: Schooling of the Immigrant; The Press; Adjustment of Homes and Family Life; Legal Protection and Correction; Health Standards and Care; Naturalization and Political Life; Industrial and Economic Amalgamation; Treatment of Immigrant Heritages; Neighborhood Agencies and Organization; Rural Developments; and Summary. The entire study has been carried out under the general direction of Mr. Allen T. Burns. Each volume appears in the name of the author who had immediate charge of the particular field it is intended to cover.

Upon the invitation of the Carnegie Corporation a committee consisting of the late Theodore Roosevelt, Prof. John Graham Brooks, Dr. John M. Glenn, and Mr. John A. Voll has acted in an advisory capacity to the director. An editorial committee consisting of Dr. Talcott Williams, Dr. Raymond B. Fosdick, and Dr. Edwin F. Gay has read and criticized the manuscripts. To both of these committees the trustees of the Carnegie Corporation are much indebted.

The purpose of the report is to give as clear a notion as possible of the methods of the agencies actually at work in this field and not to propose theories for dealing with the complicated questions involved.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF TABLES

LIST OF DIAGRAMS

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?

Let us come straight to the fact that this absence of exclusive racial marks is the distinguishing physical characteristic of the American. True of him as of no other now or ever in the past, is the fact that he is, broadly speaking, the product of all races. It is of our fundamental history and tradition from the beginning that in America all peoples may find destination, if not refuge, and upon a basis of virtual race equality mingle, and for good or ill, send down to posterity in a common stream their racial values—and their racial defects. Whether we like it or not, this is the fact. We are not a race, in any ethnic sense. At most, we are in the very early stages of becoming one.

Prof. Ulysses G. Weatherly, of Indiana University, said:[6]

Every great historical race is a composite of originally separate elements merged into a unity whose ruling characteristic is an increasing integration of culture rather than of blood. This process of merging is believed by Gumplowicz to constitute the very essence of world history.

And he quotes Gumplowicz, in Der Rassencampf, to this effect:

Throughout the whole history of men stretches a continuous process of amalgamation which, beginning with the smallest primitive synthetic groups and following a race-building law to us unknown, binds together and amalgamates small, heterogenous groups into even larger unities, into peoples, races, and nations, perpetually bringing them into conflict against other similarly constituted and amalgamated peoples, nations, and races, and through this conflict into ever new fields of conquest and culture, which again consolidates and amalgamates the heterogenous elements.

The American people has been and is being made by exactly this process. We are in the midst of the making of the “American.” It does not yet appear what he shall be, but one thing is certain, he is not to be of any particular racial type now distinguishable. Saxon, Teuton, and Kelt, Latin and Slav—to say nothing of any appreciable contribution by yellow and brown races as yet negligible in this aspect of the question—each of the races that we now know on this soil will have its share of “ancestorial” responsibility for the “typical American” that is to be.

NOT RACIAL, BUT CULTURAL

Leaving for the long future, then, the evolution of the hereditary type, is there so soon something “home grown,” some “integration of culture,” that is peculiarly our own? Every American knows in his heart that however subtle and elusive, however difficult of definition, there is something real that distinguishes “America.”

In the attempt to fix the boundaries for the new Poland, the Peace Conference sought in vain for some limits of language or of political unity on which to base their demarcation. It came down at last to a simple question:

“Do you want to be Poles?”

And the question was enough.

Who doubts the answer to the question: Do you want to be American? There is something more than love of home, something higher than the liking of a cat for the warm place under the familiar stove, that stirs the heart of every normal American when he sees the Stars and Stripes. The alien who declares it his intention to become a citizen of the United States may not be able to put it in words, but he means, and he knows that he means, something real and vital, recognizes a substantial distinction, when he says that he wants to be an American!

There must be, there is, there has been always, in the midst of the racial chaos which to-day constitutes perhaps our greatest social problem, something that may be called nationally even if not yet racially American; something indigenous on this soil as on no other. It belongs to us. Up to a time beginning a quarter of a century ago, when the so-called “new immigration” from Southeastern Europe and southern Russia set in in full flood, and now anew in the experiences of the World War, it was and has again become, a thing shared by all of our racial groups and elements—peculiarly American. It answers the test set forth by Professor Weatherly in the paper already quoted, of the completion of the nationalizing process: “... when the things of the spirit are held in common and cherished by all, even if some specific ethnic or linguistic differences survive.” Or, in the words which he attributes to Renan:

To have a common glory in the past, a common will in the present; to have done great things together, to desire to do still greater—these are the essential conditions for being a People.

Professor Weatherly repeatedly emphasizes the great point—that “it is not sufficient that peoples should merely have undergone similar experiences” in order to be knit into a nation; “they must have undergone them together.” Most of the great modern nations, as he says, have passed through the same processes of social change, “but in actual adjustment to such change each has had its own separate career.”

Twenty-five years ago it was true that the term “American” meant one who, of whatever racial descent, represented something very definite, of tradition, experience, and achievement—and of promise, too—“a common glory in the past, a common will in the present”; “great things done together, and a desire to do still greater”; unity determined not by external facts alone, but by sentiment.

Now, dimly as we yet realize it, it is true again. A baptism of blood and suffering, of sacrifice and self-denial, and of common experience in a vast world emergency, and out of it a vision of better understanding and a great work before us to be done, have gone far to restore that unity of appreciation of “great things done together” and of will to do still greater which was our common glory—and was getting lost. We had, we have now, a right to be both proud and jealous of the heritage left us by our fathers of many races, and now watered by the blood of our own generation, and to look with concern, if not with dismay, upon what might portend a swallowing up of this moral, this sentimental unity, in a great inundation of newcomers, who, however well intending as individuals, have not shared our tradition and experience, and who seem not to have been fitted by any experience of their own to assimilate either the tradition of our past or our aspiration for the future.

ESSENTIALS OF “AMERICANISM”

There are essentials distinctively American upon which we can base our definition of “America” and typify her in the human being who by spirit, vision, and vigilance best represents our tradition and our aspiration. Such a definition will hold against the world—even against those of our own household who neither exemplify nor understand it. The sum total of these essentials is not paralleled now, nor in history, anywhere else on earth. For of America alone it may be said:

That however lamely and insufficiently we have lived up to it, our country is traditionally the refuge for the oppressed of every land.

That here the individual has found a fuller freedom to seek his happiness in his own way. More than any other nation, America has never recognized a political autocracy, has reckoned Man above every consideration of property, class, or dynasty.

That here only has the individual male from the beginning been deemed the ultimate political unit—“one man, one vote.” The country-wide adoption of Woman Suffrage extends this concept to include women.

That however crudely we have practiced it, we have aspired to estimate essential justice and the common sense of right relationship—fair play between man and man—as the final standard and appeal of human conduct, over against every claim of precedent and authority.

That from the outset of this nation, the distinguishing spirit of America has been a protest against Militarism and the domination of the professional soldier, against compulsory military service in time of peace. Our army and navy, always thought of as instrumentalities of last resort, reserved almost wholly for defense against aggression from without, have on principle been always under the control and direction of civilians as such, and in peace time have been recruited by voluntary enlistment. This one fact of freedom from military conscription has been the distinction of America which, more than any other thing, has attracted Europeans to our fellowship. They have fought for us and with us, but always with the American motive, embodied in the final great fact, which is America’s alone:

That when we have gone to war, our civilians armed and fighting with the devotion, courage, and effectiveness inspired only by the sense of a righteous cause, it has always been for liberty. At the beginning, in 1776, and again in 1812, we fought England to free ourselves. In 1845, despite the motive of the Slave Power to extend the area of slavery, so far as the motive of the people in general was concerned we were fighting Mexico to free our fellows in Texas. In 1861 we fought a great civil war to maintain our free Union and to liberate the negro slaves. In 1898 we fought Spain to free the Cubans, and notwithstanding this, our sole sin of imperialism, in the long run we shall have freed also the Filipinos. In 1917 we participated, no doubt decisively, in the struggle to free Europe from the threat of domination by the military autocracy of Germany. “To make the world safe for democracy”—that was the appeal which brought the hearts of the American people into the war. Of no other great nation can it be said that it never went to war except for liberty.

This is “America.” This ensemble of tradition and significance is what makes native and newcomer alike want to be an American. This is what stirs our hearts when we see the Stars and Stripes. We prize these things not alone because they are ours, not alone because in their power and glory they are peculiarly, exclusively American; but still more because they are worthy to be prized, and because they promise the ultimate incarnation of the dreams of men of good will since ever man first lifted his eyes from the ground and visioned Brotherhood.

[II]
NEW MEMBERS AND AN OLD GAME

It would be too much to say that the average immigrant from any country visions when he leaves his home the “America” outlined in the previous chapter, or even that he perceives it when, at some time after he arrives, he files his declaration of intention to seek citizenship. Doubtless in the ordinary case he comes merely to improve his personal, social, and economic condition; to put it bluntly, to get a better job. Nevertheless, we should do ourselves and our long-standing reputation in the world a great injustice if we did not recognize and take pride in the fact that the people of all races turn their faces hither not only with hope of opportunity to better their condition, but with a stirring of soul at the thought of what they believe awaits them in a land of wider liberty. That they do not always find us living up to our boast, so far as they are concerned, is the defect not of our tradition or, in the long run, of our intention, but of our practice.

At the outset the immigrant does not think about citizenship at all. The statistics gathered by this Study show conclusively that the average alien waits more than ten years before applying for citizenship. That even if he comes as early as sixteen he waits until he is twenty-eight before he files his final petition. And the vast majority of the men come between the ages of sixteen and thirty—just at the time of life when, it would seem, active participation in the political life of the country ought to be most appealing.

FACTORS IN IMMIGRATION

The alien does not come with any direct interest in citizenship. He comes to improve his status. And this motive has two aspects; the impulse is twofold—a push from behind and a pull from in front, sometimes one, usually both. The statistics displaying the fluctuations of what Prof. Frank J. Warne calls “The Tide of Immigration” are luminous in their reflection of this purely human fact. In order to see it stand forth, one must keep it vividly in mind that these tables of statistics are not mere exhibits of mathematical digits, but lists of human beings, inspired by motives precisely like our own. The 148,093 subjects of His Britannic Majesty—mostly Irish—who came to America in 1848 were, each of them, a specific individual human soul, impelled by the fact that the potato famine, or whatnot else at home, interfered with the adequacy of his meals; and attracted by the belief that he would find things better in America. The one lone Russian recorded in that year presumably represented precisely the same interplay of motives. The heavy German immigration in 1852, 1853, and 1854 was made up of men, women, and children who found conditions intolerable because of the repressions ensuing upon the revolutionary movement of ’48. And so on. On the other hand, the shrinkages in the figures in various later periods, in a general way, coincide with the times of industrial depression, unemployment, etc., in this country; things were not so attractive here as to offer substantial improvement upon the situation at home.

The six sources whence we have derived the bulk of our new population are Great Britain and Ireland; the three Scandinavian countries of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark; Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy, and Russia—in the seventy-eight years from 1840 down to and including 1918, when immigration virtually stopped owing to the conditions created by the World War. Immigration since then has been subject to influences so different from those prevailing before, and as yet so little understood, that intelligent comparisons would be perilous.[7]

Students of immigration have usually built their generalizations upon totals of inflow, frequently overlooking the striking disparity of time and numbers among the various racial groups. Yet there is much significance in this disparity. Professor Warne, for example, in the Annals of the American Academy of Political Science (1920), in an analysis generally of the upward and downward curves of immigration from all countries during the century since 1820, says:

By studying the yearly figures ... and relating them to events of industrial or economic history, we are able to understand what is probably the most significant of all the operating forces or influences at work behind this great movement of population across the Atlantic. For illustration, the number of immigrant arrivals strikingly decreased from nearly 482,000 in 1854 to 200,877 the following year, a decrease of more than one-half. This falling off reflected the effects of the greatest financial panic ever experienced in the United States up to that time.

Well enough for a generalization based on totals; but it is not to be overlooked that at that very point the then comparatively small immigration from Italy more than doubled between 1853 and 1854, jumping from 535 to 1,263, and remained above 1,000 with the exception of one year, until 1860. Again Professor Warne:

The ensuing industrial depression was followed closely by the Civil War, and it was not until 1873 that the yearly inflow again reached as large a volume, the number being nearly 460,000.

But it was precisely during the hottest and most critical years of the Civil War that German immigration increased. It had been relatively low between 1854 and 1865 (in which latter year it was 58,153), but jumped in 1866 to 120,218, and (with the exception of 1871, when it fell to 82,554) remained high until and including 1873, when it almost touched 150,000. It would seem that something must have been going on in Germany to drive these people out against the adverse economic conditions prevailing here.

The year 1873 [continues Professor Warne] marks another panic, and a striking decrease the following years in the number of alien arrivals is again recorded.

But the Austrian, Italian, and Russian immigration, which had been relatively insignificant up to 1869 and 1870, was higher in 1870–75 than ever before, and with minor ups and downs increased more or less steadily up to the very high figures of the past two decades, which gave rise to the widely believed legend entitled, “The New Immigration.”

The question of means of livelihood, of a better job, is doubtless the chief factor, but it is not the only factor. Any job at all in a free country is better, for any man worth his salt, than a far better-paid job under conditions of oppression. The man who leaves his homeland to adventure even under adverse conditions, because he cannot tolerate political tyranny, used to be regarded per se as fit for American citizenship. He is still fit, even though he belong to the traditional “New Immigration”; even though of late we have tended rather to discourage the idea that personal liberty is valuable in and of itself. It is still true that along with our fame as a land where economic opportunity is to be found, the men and women of other lands are attracted by what they still believe to be our atmosphere of liberty.

POLITICS WELCOMES THE IRISH

The Irish immigration was earliest in the field, and first to profit by the hit-or-miss methods of naturalization which prevailed in the old shiftless days. They occupied socially at the outset very much the same position that the “New Immigration” has occupied during the past twenty years; but the American politician, to whose mill any kind of a biped who might vote was grist, welcomed it, and quickly taught the Irishman the methods of the game.

How solidly the Irish were installed before the Germans began to arrive in large numbers appears in [Table I], showing the two streams of immigration between 1820 and 1840. Prior to 1840 there was no appreciable inflow from any other countries. It should be added that it was not until 1854, and then only for that one year, that the German immigration overtook the Irish. It did not again equal it until 1867.

TABLE I

Immigration From Ireland and Germany Each Year from 1820 to 1840

THEY ALWAYS HAVE BEEN DEMOCRATS

The traditional fidelity of the Irish to the Democratic party began forthwith. The elements in the population which were Whigs, and afterward became Republicans tended, on the whole, to be the more prosperous folk of the community; also they were largely of the Protestant faith. Very early in our political history, therefore, there came to be, to some extent, a division in which both social standing and religion played a part. Most of the Irish were poor, and nearly all of them were Roman Catholics. The Democratic party was rather the party of the poor and the foreign born, and when the great influx of Roman Catholic Irish injected also the religious issue, it was only natural that a kind of racial allegiance should attach the Irish to the Democratic party. The Know-Nothing and Native American agitations of the middle of the last century deepened the rift, and confirmed the Irish in their political faith.

Gustavus Myers says, in his History of Tammany Hall:[8]

About the year 1840 ... Tammany began to be ruled from the bottom of the social stratum.... The policy of encouraging foreigners, at first mildly started in 1823, was now developed into a system. The Whigs antagonized the entrance of foreign-born citizens into politics, and the Native American Party was organized expressly to bar them almost entirely from the enjoyment of political rights. The immigrant had no place to turn but Tammany Hall. In part to assure itself this vote, the organization opened a bureau, a modest beginning of what became a colossal department. An office established in the Wigwam, to which specially paid agents or organization runners brought the immigrant, drilled into him the advantages of joining Tammany, and furnished him the means and legal machinery needed to take out his naturalization papers.... Tammany took the immigrant in charge, cared for him, made him feel that he was a human being with distinct political rights, and converted him into a citizen. How sagacious this was, each year revealed. Immigration soon poured in heavily, and there came a time when the foreign vote outnumbered that of the native-born citizens.

It is true, but irrelevant, that in an earlier day Tammany had been as anti-foreign as anybody—originally it was decidedly aristocratic in tone. Myers recites how, on the night of April 24, 1817, two hundred Irishmen marched to the Wigwam “to impress upon the Committee the wisdom of nominating (for Congress) Thomas Addis Emmett, as well as other Irish Catholics on the Tammany ticket in the future.”

All this had long since become ancient history by 1840. Long before that time the Irish devotion to the Democratic party in general, and to Tammany Hall in particular, had become deeply rooted.

EARLY GERMANS BECAME REPUBLICANS

The Germans, who, as has been shown, formed the second great wave in the “tide of immigration,” began to come in formidable numbers about 1836, passing the 30,000 mark in 1845. While they were, on the whole, better educated and possibly more intelligent than the Irish, they were handicapped, as the Irish were not, by difference of language; so that for the practical purposes of the native American politician they were equally ignorant. And the mass of the immigrants of both races were peasants without experience in relation to political participation.

Very many of the Germans, however, had fled from the repressions at home preceding, accompanying, and following the revolutionary movements about 1848; they were to a great extent Protestants, and they were naturally opposed to slavery—though this is not to say that the Irish ever favored it. Generally speaking, Germans reacted favorably to the Republican party.

Both races took American politics as they found it. Let it not be supposed that corruption was the exclusive invention or hall mark of Tammany Hall! Even in England, at this time, politics was a dirty business. The Whigs did their best to beat Tammany at the game in which it had become expert. Myers says:[9]

In the fall election of 1838 the Whig frauds were enormous and indisputable. The Whigs raised large sums of money, which were handed to ward workers for the procuring of votes. About two hundred roughs were brought from Philadelphia, in different divisions, each man receiving $22.... Ex-convicts distributed Whig tickets and busily auctioneered. The cabins of all the vessels along the wharves were ransacked, and every man, whether or not a citizen or resident of New York, who could be wheedled into voting a Whig ballot, was rushed to the polls and his vote smuggled in.

This was the election which made William H. Seward Governor of the state of New York!

EFFECTS OF THE GOLD CRAZE

The whole situation was intensified during the years when corruption reached its greatest heights by the conditions ensuing upon the discovery of gold in California. The port of New York welcomed ships from the west coast bringing gold, and ships from across the Atlantic bringing immigrants. The “bulge” in the curve of immigration from Great Britain and Ireland, Germany, and Scandinavia in the period 1849–54 undoubtedly represents preponderantly the reaction abroad to the tales of gold to be found on the street corners of America.

And the immigrant stepped into an atmosphere of corruption in every field—including politics. The whole country was more or less money mad. The effect of the gold craze, as Myers (page 154) says, “was a still further lowering of the public tone; standards were generally lost sight of, and all means of ‘getting ahead’ came to be considered legitimate. Politics, trafficking in nominations and political influence, found it a most auspicious time.”

VAST NATURALIZATION FRAUDS

It is hard to realize now the public attitude of those old days on the subject of naturalization. There was a fabulous amount of virgin territory to be opened; new communities needed population, and especially muscle labor; lavish inducements, including the right to vote, were held out to anything in the form of a man who could be brought to help in the task. It was many years before citizenship came to be regarded as a precious thing, to be guarded with scrupulous vigilance. And as both of the great political parties were guilty of crimes against the ballot box, it was taken for granted that they were inevitable in politics.

The vexatious technicalities which now seem so unjust to many an applicant for citizenship are, after all, only reaction at the other extreme to the incredible laxity which characterized the process in the early years. The population of what was then New York City was only 515,547 in 1850; 813,669 in 1860; and 942,292 in 1870; but in the eight years, 1860–67, inclusive, more than 67,000 aliens were naturalized in that city alone. The naturalizations in New York City in each year from 1856 to 1867, inclusive, in only two courts—the Superior Court and the Court of Common Pleas—an average of more than 9,000 a year is shown in the following table:

TABLE II

Number of Aliens Naturalized Each Year from 1856 to 1867 in Two Courts in New York City{1}

note 1: John I. Davenport, The Wig and the Jimmy, p. 12.

These figures are taken from a curious pamphlet, published in 1869 by John I. Davenport, who was United States Commissioner and Chief Supervisor of Elections for the Southern District of New York, under the cryptic title, The Wig and the Jimmy, which tells in detail the story of the debauching of naturalization by these two courts. The year 1868, however, saw the scandal reach unprecedented heights. Says Mr. Davenport:[10]

... Notwithstanding that the yearly average of naturalizations had been but about 9,000; that the greatest number naturalized in a single year never reached 16,500; that three years had elapsed since the close of the war in which 35,927 aliens had been made citizens, a yearly average of 11,975, or an excess of 3,000 per year above the annual average for twelve years; that the addition of such excess to the diminished numbers naturalized in 1862, 1863, and 1864 would preserve the ratio, and account for those who from fear of being drafted had refrained from applying during those years of the war; that the rebellion had reduced the alien population of New York City, many of whom enlisted, were killed, died from disease, or after the war found homes elsewhere; and, finally, that the yearly average of emigration (sic) from and including 1847 to 1860—a period of 13 years—had been 197,435, while for the four years from 1860 to 1863 inclusive—and none who arrived subsequently could be legally naturalized in 1868—the yearly average of alien arrivals had been but 100,962, or an annual loss of one-half, yet orders were early in September passed along the Democratic line to prepare on a gigantic scale for the naturalization of aliens during the coming month. The Supreme Court also determined for the first time to engage in the work of making citizens. In accordance with this known determination, there were printed for the use of the courts ... a total of 30,000 applications and 30,000 certificates for the Superior Court, and 75,000 applications and 39,000 certificates for the amateur court [Supreme].

The Court of Common Pleas, which save for a year or two previous had done the larger share of the work of naturalization, did but little in 1868, its total for the year being 3,145, of which 1,645 were in October. Justice requires the further statement that there was no evidence whatever of any fraud in this court, although all its judges were elected as Democrats, while proof was abundant that the duty entrusted to it of making citizens of the United States was discharged throughout with marked propriety and dignity.

In the Supreme and Superior Courts only were frauds proven. To what extent we will now consider. The following table was sworn to as being the daily number of applications for naturalization on file in the Supreme Court Clerk’s office for 1868:

TABLE III

Applicants for Naturalization in Supreme Court, New York City, in October, 1868

The significance of these great totals of applications for naturalization within a few days before election appears in Mr. Davenport’s summary of the behavior of the judges:[11]

But the essential aid rendered by these judges need not be further detailed. It was mainly comprised of one or more of the following derelictions of duty:

I. Hasty and incomplete examination of applicants and witnesses.

II. Total neglect at times to examine the one class or the other.

III. Through negligence, imposition, which might easily have been guarded against, or direct complicity, the issue of certificates in the names of persons who never appeared in Court, applied therefor, produced a witness, or took an oath.

IV. Similar issue of certificates to applicants, persons of assumed or fictitious names and others, upon the oath of residence and moral character of persons of assumed and fictitious names, or of known criminals and persons of immoral character.

V. Similar issue of certificates upon “minor applications” when the persons to whom such certificates issued were known, or could readily have been ascertained to be, unentitled thereto on such applications.

VI. Total neglect or refusal to commit known disreputable persons and others whose business it was for pecuniary or other consideration to act as witnesses, and who in such capacity repeatedly appeared before them.

VII. The conducting of naturalization proceedings in a secret manner, by causing citizens and others to be denied admission to the court-room, or ejected therefrom when observed.

The Judiciary Committee of the New York State Assembly, in a report upon the first notorious election frauds made to that House of the state legislature thirty years before, or on April 6, 1838, already had registered the fact that this was no post-war state of affairs, and depicted the situation of which the frauds of 1868 were only one year’s fruit:

Men vote who do not reside in the ward, often not in the state; aliens are frequently brought to the polls and their vote imposed upon the inspectors, although many of them have not been a week in the country; and voters are not infrequently taken from poll to poll, voting in three or four different wards at the same election. These are the frauds constantly practiced at our elections, to the disgrace of the state, and to the manifest wrong of the country.

It was partly the sense of the great public danger lying in such conditions, partly the growing anti-foreign feeling, and altogether an improving public morality, that beginning about 1870 and increasing as the years passed, brought about the cleansing of public elections and the reform embodied in the naturalization law of 1906 which has totally abolished the situation into which the immigrants of the mid-century and earlier stepped as into a swamp. Still survives in some quarters the notion that the alien is hurried from the ship to the ballot box, and that he pours therein some corrupting influence brought with him from abroad. The latter never was true; he has accepted and taken advantage of the situation which we ourselves created and suffered for generations to exist. The former was true during three-quarters of a century, but it is true no longer, and has not been true for nearly two decades.

FIRST CHOICE IN POLITICS

Bear it in mind that the chief motive of the newcomer is the same as that which usually leads men to go anywhere—the desire to “better himself.” It is notable that a very large number of immigrants arrive with the notion that the Republican party is the “party of prosperity,” of the “full dinner pail,” high wages, and the other advantages which have been the widely advertised slogans of that party. Without passing upon the question of the truth of these slogans, one may note that what actually happens is that the immigrant’s real search is for that connection, political or industrial, which involves employment and other advantages of a material kind. As soon as the conditions permit, he joins the penumbra of the political organization which has jobs to distribute, which controls public contracts and the wages that go with them. That means Tammany and the Democratic party in New York City; in Philadelphia it means the Republican organization, which in its day has followed and in some respects surpassed Tammany in all the ways of political corruption and machinism. In other cities it has been to this party or that, as the dominant color shifted, that the immigrant has swung.

As long as the naturalization process was the sport of corrupt politics, the political organizations gave early attention to the alien. With the institution of the present stringent law and practice, however, and also with the vast magnitude of the flood—swamping all the machinery which had been devised to absorb the immigrants—the politicians up to a recent time ceased to pay any attention to them. One of the results of this has been a considerable increase in the lapse of time between the arrival of the immigrant and his first steps in the direction of citizenship. One of the most enterprising of the younger leaders of Tammany Hall said to the present writer some months ago:

We don’t pay any attention to the alien until he comes to us for some favor—a job, a peddling license, some help when his boy is arrested, or assistance in getting out his naturalization papers. There’s too many of ’em. When they do come, we do what we can for them, and naturally we say: “Well, how about it? Are you going to see the Democratic organization only when you want something? Why aren’t you a citizen? Get yourself naturalized and then come along with us.”

All of which is very natural and human, and a good illustration of the way in which the politician gets his hold upon the individual voter—newcomer or native.

The war created a new interest in the alien, brought new pressure upon him to become a citizen. Private concerns demanded at least “first papers” as a condition for employment; labor organizations intensified their insistence upon citizenship, or at least declaration of intention, as a prerequisite to membership; laws were passed in many states increasing the disabilities of aliens. And the political organizations generally have returned, but in a far better spirit, to the former search for voters among the foreign born; creating committees and bureaus to assist the alien in getting naturalization, and resuming the old “hand-picking” methods of getting the foreign born into active participation.

Little attention has been paid to the extent to which the politicians use private jobs as a part of their patronage. Not only the petty employments in saloons and even brothels have been at the disposal of the local leaders; but places for unskilled labor with street-railroad corporations and other public utilities needing the franchises and privileges in the public streets, have been utilized as the coin-current of local political traffic. Not infrequently a merchant finds that the stringency of the enforcement of ordinances regarding his buildings, blocking sidewalks with his merchandise, etc., is considerably mitigated after he has acted upon the suggestion of a district leader as to the employment of some person as truck hand or watchman. And the writer well remembers one occasion, many years ago in Chicago, when the street-railroad companies were keenly interested in an aldermanic election, wherein the polling places in certain doubtful wards were blocked by long lines of obviously foreign-born laborers, few if any of them voters, who did not attempt to vote, but monopolized the line for blocks, effectively slowing down the voting so as to prevent the real voters from getting to the polls at all!

THE POLITICIAN CLOSE TO HUMANITY

The secret of the whole business lies in the fact that political machines, and the political bosses of all sizes and grades who make up their staffs, are powerful and long-lived in just the measure to which they grow out of and identify their activities with the rank and file of the community—clear down to the bottom. The vote of a new-made citizen born in Galicia or Syria or Portugal is just as good for his purpose as that of a Son of the American Revolution—vastly more so if (as sometimes happens) the new voter will follow his “advice” and the old one will not! Furthermore, their vitality, especially in the poorer sections, is commensurate with the constancy of their activities; that is, their practical utility to the people all the time, for all purposes. As William Bennet Munro says:[12]

The work which the party organizations lay out to do, and in large measure actually perform, is extensive and exacting. It does not, as in Europe, all fall within the few weeks which precede an election; it is spread over the whole year.

And he goes on to describe, aptly, why this work is “spread over the whole year,” and how it comes about that the boss, little or big, acquires so great an influence in his bailiwick. What he says applies most aptly to the so-called “poorer districts,” where the foreign-born voters live in the greatest numbers:

It seems usually to be forgotten that the evolution of the boss follows the law of natural selection, which in this case secures the survival of the man who is most resourceful in using to full advantage the conditions that he finds about him. To gain even a ward leadership and to hold this post requires industry, perseverance, and, no end of shrewd tactfulness. He must not be content with doing the work that comes to him; he must look for things to do. As his work consists mainly in doing favors for voters, he must inspire requests as well as grant them. Therefore he encourages voters to come to him for help when they are out of work, or in any other sort of trouble. When a voter is arrested, the ward or district leader will lend his services to secure bail or to provide counsel, or will arrange to have the offender’s fine paid for him. Then there are the day-to-day favors which the local boss stands ready to do for all who come to him, provided they are voters or can influence voters.

Picturing the boss thus as the district philanthropist, the description goes on to enlarge upon the more sinister uses to which the power thus gained is devoted, in punishing disloyalty. And this is even more effective upon those relatively unfamiliar with the niceties, the ins-and-outs, of public administration:

If a word from the boss will get one man employment, a word will also, very often, procure another employee’s dismissal. At a hint from him, the small shopkeeper, the peddler, the pawnbroker, the hackman, can be worried daily by the police or by the health and sanitary officials of the city on baseless or imaginary pretexts—tactics in which, as the history of almost every larger city shows, the machinery is unrelenting and vindictive.

The affirmative side of the district leader’s activity is the one that makes most impression upon the neighborhood. Almost every sort of reformer, who would bring to the foreign-speaking district a sense of the need for voting for a different sort of alderman, for example, lives in another part of town, represents another stratum of society, comes into no sort of natural touch with his foreign-born fellow citizen. But the latter knows the district leader—last winter he got a job, a little coal, a bed in a hospital for his wife; his boy was let off by the police after a piece of reckless mischief; or there was some other human favor; and all the return he is asked to make—cheap enough, to be sure—is that on election day he shall vote as the district leader who helped him in his need asks him to vote. What difference does it make to him? Show him a difference, convince him that something real, something that he can understand, is involved, and he will respond. But nobody shows him. “Uptown,” whence comes the reformer whom he does not know, and whose motives he has no substantial reason to respect, does not understand his life or its problems; does not even live in the ward. The district leader does. He is his neighbor, and he sees him almost every day.

Then, too, the political organization meets him on the social side, provides a club, which in the intervals between elections gives entertainments, has pool tables, provides cigars; used to provide liquor. A spirit of fellowship grows up; the new foreign-born voter gains acquaintance at the natural point of contact between his daily life and the politics into which he is being introduced. The result is obvious.

POLITICAL ASPECTS OF SOCIAL CLUBS

The spontaneous groups of foreign-speaking people of nearly every race, which have sprung up everywhere in response to the varied needs of the strangers within our gates—social, insurance, musical, athletic, etc.—necessarily and naturally take on political aspects. As President Wilson said once, “politics is human nature”; there is nothing sinister about this fact. It is wholesome that groups of folk, coming together spontaneously about a nucleus of common interest, should consider together and act together, in regard to such public matters as they think concern them. The only thing that is really dangerous in a republic is stolid indifference; it is on that that corruption and injustice feed.

In the matter of helping their fellow countrymen to secure naturalization, these organizations perform a service of value and importance both to the alien and to the country. Many of these racial societies devote much attention to old-country politics, and form nests of propaganda and even more concrete activity whose effects are felt not so much in this country as “back home.” And when, as in the case of Ireland, Poland, Italy, and so on, the issues of foreign politics are made the bone of contention in American political contests, these German-American, Italian-American, Polish-American societies may become exceedingly active in our own affairs, and project lines of division which may greatly complicate the politician’s task, and sometimes stand him upon his head.[13]

It is not too much to say that the power of Tammany Hall in politics, and that of every other important political organization in Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco, Boston, or elsewhere—including those dominant in rural districts—grows out of intimate association with the people in their daily lives, and could grow out of nothing else. “Power and patronage,” says Professor Munro, “provide a cycle hard to break.” True; but “power and patronage” is only a phrase. Behind it lies the fact that the politician gains and holds his power because he deserves it; through his organization of the machinery, always “on the job,” through which human beings, with wives and children to feed, clothe and shelter, get the means to do it. The small, unskilled job in the employ of the city, or of business which can be helped or harmed by political or official action, is the coin-current through which the politician controls—so far as he does control—the rank and file of the foreign-born voters. This, and the small and larger personal human favors that he is in a position to render.

Here, with the first economic “toe-hold” that the immigrant gets in America, begins his introduction to our life and to our politics.

POLITICS A GREAT AMERICANIZING FORCE

Politics, local politics—the ordinary interest of the ordinary citizen; the day’s work and the day’s life, are great Americanizing forces, and they are working every minute. The immigrant generally, especially he of the so-called “new immigration,” comes here without much if any experience in public affairs. All the life of all the generations from which he comes has been passed without real participation; government in the old country went on over his head, in a rarefied stratum which he never entered and of which he knew little. That is one reason why, on the average, it takes more than ten years for him to come to the point of asking for citizenship.

Of late some of the very people who declared that the immigrant comes here with only “sordid motives” have favored pressure upon him to become a citizen by means of refusing him employment unless he does become one. The great increase in declarations of intention during the past three or four years has been due almost entirely to the restrictions adopted formally or informally all over the country confining employment, even in privately owned industries, to those who have at least taken out “first papers.” Even in the Bureau of Naturalization there was for a time more than a tendency to pursue this policy of forcing citizenship upon aliens. It was abandoned because no government can kidnap the subjects or citizens of another without getting into difficulty. There is still a good deal of confusion of thought about this matter.

The importance of it lies in the fact—obvious to any right thought about it—that we want for our new citizens only those who come of their own accord and free will. We want, moreover, only those who are right-minded. The effort to stamp out the use of every mother tongue but one, to obliterate all affection for the old home in Scandinavia, Bavaria, Dalmatia, Bohemia, not only is futile; we do not want for our fellow citizens the kind of people who can turn their back without a qualm upon the memories of childhood.

Breathes there the man with soul so dead

Who never to himself hath said,

This is my own, my native land!

Whose heart hath ne’er within him burned

As home his footsteps he hath turned

From wandering on a foreign strand?

What sort of an American could be made out of one able in any circumstances—worst of all under repressive compulsion—to turn his back upon the tongue, the traditions, and the associations of his fathers? We are not such ourselves, and in our sane minds we do not want those who join us to be such. The process of real assimilation is a process slow in its nature, reaching not forms and words, but sentiments of the highest and most subtle kind.

You cannot beat love of country into any worthwhile person with a club—or with a law.

[III]
CITIZENSHIP: UNDER THIS FLAG, AND OTHERS

There is, indeed, such a thing as a “man without a country,” and it is only a few years since the United States, even if inadvertently, legislated so that there may easily be now a woman without one. But the laws of nations make no provisions for the existence voluntarily of anyone who may regard himself as “a citizen of the world.” With the vanishment of terra incognita in the final achievement of human exploration at the two poles of the earth, virtually every foot of the surface of the globe has come, at least constructively, under the dominion of some government. And with it every man, woman, and child on earth has acquired or had thrust upon him a legal nationality of some sort, from which, generally speaking, he can escape only by choosing or having thrust upon him another—however feeble or tenuous its grasp, however slight or contemptuous his perception and recognition of it.

The Great War emphatically registered this fact, with its ruthless inclusion of friend, neutral, and foe within some category of practicable citizenship. In the United States the Selective Service Act, and other legislation as well—to say nothing of the extra-legal practices indulged in under cover of the popular state of mind—permitted no human being to regard himself as immune to effective classification under some sovereignty. The “conscientious objector,” the “philosophical anarchist,” and every sort of philosopher, however much he previously may have imagined himself free to abjure allegiance to government, found that his property, his food, his sons, his own very personal flesh-and-blood, were, after all, not his own, but were subject to conscription by the state. However much his spirit might be of fellowship with the saints of his cult or religion, in all material respects he must render unto Cæsar the things that Cæsar said were Cæsar’s.

From the most primitive times this has been so, even if in the America of the happy-go-lucky times of peace it has been lightly regarded or scarcely realized at all. The “gang spirit,” under the sway of which men always have held loyalty to the local clan to be one of the chief of obligatory virtues, is of the essence and fabric of group life, and is the tap-root of patriotism. It embodies an allegiance both to blood and to locality. Through the warp of all political history are woven two kindred threads representing these two allegiances; sometimes one, sometimes the other—in later development something of both. The lawyers speak of them as the Jus Sanguinis, the Law of the Blood, and the Jus Solis, the Law of the Soil, and distinguish between them; but both represent the claim of the community upon the loyalty and, if need be, the sacrifice and bodily service of the individual.

A classic illustration of the deeply embedded feeling that man cannot separate himself from the virtues, the sins, and the limitations of his clan, his country, is the tragedy in the valley of Achor, related in the Old Testament Book of Joshua,[14] wherein it was held that the sin of Achan the son of Zerah was ipso facto the sin of all Israel. And for the offense of one man,

... Joshua, and all Israel with him, took Achan the son of Zerah, and the silver, and the garment, and the wedge of gold, and his sons, and his daughters, and his oxen, and his asses, and his sheep, and his tent, and all that he had; ... and all Israel stoned him with stones, and burned them with fire, after they had stoned them with stones.[15]

This, with a vengeance, was a dramatization of the Jus Sanguinis, the Law of the Blood, by virtue of which an individual acquires nationality and civic responsibility through the blood of his ancestry, regardless of the place of his birth!

ROOTS OF POLITICAL SOCIETY

The principle was a natural consequence upon the nomadic life of families and tribes, of primitive groups wandering often in strange and even hostile territory, to whom in absence of fixed abode and boundaries locality was of little importance, but tribal solidarity and unity of purpose and allegiance were vital to defense, to group survival. The family, and after it the clan or group of blood-related families, were the beginnings of political society.

Throughout ancient times the Law of the Blood persisted; the law of citizenship in early Greece and Rome was based upon the idea of family inheritance. But with the dissolution of the Roman Empire and the rise of feudalism, the Jus Sanguinis gradually gave way to a standard of citizenship based upon locality—to Jus Solis, under which a child became ipso facto a citizen or subject of the jurisdiction within which he was born, more or less regardless of the nationality or allegiance of his parents. This was a natural concomitant of feudalism; as the conflicts between military chieftains and groups divided the land into relatively definite jurisdictions, and the tenure of territory and the stability of boundaries and peace in the realm depended almost wholly upon military strength, it was to the interest of both lord and vassal to maintain the largest possible forces for defense, and conservation of population depended chiefly upon birth. Even to the peasant subject, maintenance of almost any status quo was comparatively worth while for the sake of the peaceful enjoyment of such home and happiness as were his lot.

INFLUENCE OF EMIGRATION TO AMERICA

Beginning with the period immediately following the French Revolution—which, it should be remembered, was only the most violent and impressive of the upheavals of that general epoch in many parts of Europe—a distinct reaction toward the Jus Sanguinis appeared. This is variously accounted for; but most historians attribute it to a desire on the part of the older countries of Europe to offset the serious loss of subjects threatened by emigration to America, which had begun to tempt adventurous souls by the opportunity for individual liberty and initiative and escape from the tyrannies of feudalism and religious autocracy.

Whatever the reason, the nineteenth century witnessed on the one hand the return of the nations of the Old World to the Law of the Blood, and on the other the development in the New World of the Law of the Soil.

This is a theoretical statement. In point of fact, in the designation of the mode of acquisition or loss of citizenship, no two of the nations of the world are exactly in accord; the most hopeless confusion exists; but with a constant and increasing effort to harmonize the procedure, and now with a good hope that in the coming days some measure of uniformity may become practicable. In matters of secondary importance, such as the international postal regulations, telegraphic communication and sanitary co-operation, it has been virtually impossible thus far to bring about a common policy. How much more difficult must it be to harmonize the principles of citizenship, involving, as that does, intricate historical and political considerations—immensely complicated by the shifts of boundary due to the war—and the very bases of national existence in the control by the community of the allegiance and the industrial and military service of subjects and citizens?

THE RIGHT TO EMIGRATE

Nevertheless, all countries have in some measure practically recognized the right of the human individual to emigrate, though there have persisted laws and decrees expressing the attempt to retain legal jurisdiction and allegiance. The strength of these efforts depends largely upon whether the basic theory of citizenship has its roots in the Jus Sanguinis or the Jus Solis. For it may be said generally that the nations of the world are divided roughly in this regard by their adherence to the one theory or the other, though we look almost in vain for a pure example of either; in some countries there are interwoven lines of both, and in many it is almost impossible to determine which prevails. For practical purposes, and subject to such modifications as may be made in the era of readjustment upon which the World War has launched us, we may depend upon the following general classification:

The Jus Sanguinis dominates in Austria, China, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Japan, Monaco, Norway, Persia, Rumania, Serbia.

The Jus Solis prevails in the canton of Geneva, Switzerland, and in Argentina.

The Jus Sanguinis combined with the Jus Solis is found in Belgium, Greece, Italy, Luxemburg, Russia, Spain, Turkey.

The Jus Solis modified by the Jus Sanguinis prevails in most of the states of the Americas, and in Bulgaria, Denmark, Egypt, Great Britain, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland.

THE SUBJECT VS. THE ACTIVE MEMBER

In thought and writing on the subject of citizenship, two concepts of the word “citizen” persist, and usually are treated as to such an extent interchangeable as to produce a fatal confusion. For they are not interchangeable. They differ in essence, and it is of the utmost importance that they should be clearly distinguished. In the distinction lies all the difference between Liberty and Autocracy. Something, if not all, of this difference lies in the distinction between the Law of the Blood and the Law of the Soil.

The first and commonest of these concepts is that which must have colored the thought of the feudal lord as he looked upon “his” people, belonging to him because they belonged to the soil which his sword controlled. This concept contemplates the citizen or subject as invested with the character of a national body politic, bound by an obligatory allegiance to it and its political institutions because he is there, born there, or led there by the circumstances of his life.

The other concept, which we like to think constitutes the basis of what we call “America,” for it is of the essence of anything worthy of the name of Democracy, contemplates the citizen as a participant in the fact of sovereignty, one who owns an undivided and indivisible share in the community title, and whose right and duty it is to take a definite part and acknowledge a definite responsibility in the business of government. In this study of naturalization and political life of the foreign-born citizen it is with this second concept that we have most to do.

ESSENTIALS OF CITIZENSHIP: ANCIENT—AND AMERICAN

What, then, are the essentials of that citizenship to which an alien aspires and addresses himself when he seeks to become an active member in the American community whose members are something more than mere chattels of the sovereign?

“There is nothing that more characterizes a complete citizen,” says Aristotle, “than having a share in the judicial and executive part of the government.... He, and he only, is a citizen who enjoys a due share in the government of that community of which he is a member.” But Aristotle was speaking from the point of view of a community in which not all individuals there resident were the sort of citizens he was talking about. According to that great Greek the best-ordered states did not include in the term “citizen” mechanics or others who worked for wages, and utterly unmentionable in any such connection was the great mass of slaves who had virtually no human rights at all. Aristotle’s “citizen” was one of the relatively few endowed with political rights and responsibilities. In the Greek city-states and in the early Roman Republic, citizenship was at first restricted to certain of the older houses (phylos, gentes), but with the development of economic intercourse the few dominant families gradually lost their exclusive power, and other free inhabitants were included in participation in the affairs of state.

In Rome the right of citizenship was conferred at first upon the leading families in allied cities, and later upon whole communities. By the year 100 B.C., nearly all Italians were citizens. But the Empire brought about great restrictions in this matter; a gradual narrowing of the limitations took place; along with a great extension of the name “citizen” came a great decrease in the actual participation of the “citizen” in the business of government; so that by the time the Emperor Caracalla was extending something called “citizenship” to all Roman subjects, he actually was doing little more than to make certain intolerable taxes universal.

So the old Greek and Roman idea of “citizenship” will not answer our purpose. We have, however imperfect our realization of the fact, something quite different to offer, something vastly greater to demand.

In the modern world citizenship has come to mean membership in a political community. It involves the status of an individual with reference to a particular state. And that status is determined by the laws of the individual states, for everywhere it is stoutly maintained that the right to determine how and when a person may become and remain a citizen is one of the first prerogatives of sovereignty. In a number of recent works on citizenship the question has been raised whether the bond of citizenship is by nature contractual. The affirmative is held by Prof. Andrew Weiss of the University of Paris; he declares it to be “generally recognized that the bond of nationality is a contractual one; and that the bond uniting to the state each of its citizens is formed by an agreement of their wills, express or implied.” This view is rejected as unsound by various English and American publicists.[16] These writers assert that whatever may be the theory of the origin of the state, the fact is that the relation of the citizen to the state is a relation sui generis, and that the admission of a person to membership in a state is an act of sovereignty. The law of the state is supreme.

The reasonable fact is that there is an element of truth in both of these contentions. The great increase in facilities for international communication and travel has made emigration a common thing, and the law in practice, whatever it may be in letter, has recognized in varying ways the fact that the human individual can, does abjure his “contract” with the state where he has lived, and seek admission to one which for this reason and that he thinks likely to be more salubrious for the pursuit of what he regards as his happiness. For, after all is said, the fact remains that men stay here or go there in that pursuit. A crowd goes home when it begins to rain not because the crowd is getting wet, but because each individual of it, in his separate personal eachness, so to speak, has water running down his neck and desires to find a place where he can get dry. Waves of emigration represent countless individuals each of whom believes that elsewhere, or in some particular place, he can be more comfortable in the practices and activities which constitute his life by day and by night, and maybe find a broader and richer field in which to grow and raise his family.

The offer of just this kind of opportunity has induced many hundreds of thousands of human beings from all parts of the earth to dissolve the bond, contractual or what you will, between themselves and the land of their birth or previous habitation, and come to these shores. We have invited them, and devised elaborate machinery by which to welcome them into our fellowship. Not only has the invitation been definitely expressed; we have opened wide gates in our bars, and placed premiums upon entrance therein.

BASES OF AMERICAN CITIZENSHIP

The bases of citizenship in this country are two, established in the Constitution of the United States and the legislation and decisions explanatory thereof:

I. Every person, of whatever race descended, born in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction, including children of American fathers born abroad, is ipso facto a citizen of the United States.

II. All other persons eligible for citizenship in the United States must acquire that citizenship through the legal process known as Naturalization.

It was in the great case of Wong Kim Ark[17] that the Supreme Court, in 1897, established the right of citizenship by birth on this soil, regardless of race or descent. The question in this case involved a child born in California, of Chinese parents who, because of their race, could not themselves become citizens. In this decision, a classic in the law of American citizenship, the court set forth the following fundamental principles to be observed in determining citizenship by birth in the United States:

1. The Constitution of the United States must be interpreted in the light of the Common Law, under which every child born in England, even though of alien parents, was a natural-born citizen.

2. The qualifying words in the Fourteenth Amendment, “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” exclude two classes of persons—children born of alien enemies in hostile occupation, and children of diplomatic representatives of a foreign state. (The latter, from the earliest times, both under the laws of England and in decisions of American courts, had been recognized to be exceptions to the fundamental rule of citizenship by birth within the national jurisdiction.)

The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution,[18] adopted in 1868, incorporated no new rule or principle into American law. Neither did the Civil Rights Act, passed in 1866 as a Reconstruction measure, although it was the first statutory definition in the United States of citizenship by birth. That Act says:

All persons born in the United States, and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed, are citizens of the United States and of the States where they reside.

COMMON-LAW DEFINITION TAKEN FOR GRANTED

The English Common Law, then, is the original source of our definition. That definition, taken over with the formation of the American Republic out of the English colonies, was so familiar, so much a part of the nature of things political, that nobody thought it necessary to formulate it—or a new one.

By the Common Law of England, every person born within the dominions of the Crown, no matter whether of English or of foreign parents—and in the latter case whether the parents were settled or merely temporarily sojourning in the country, was an English subject; save only children of foreign ambassadors ... or a child born in hostile occupation of any part of the territories of England.[19]

When the Constitution of the United States was made, a “citizenship of the United States” was recognized but nowhere defined, and it was nearly a century before it found specific statutory expression in the Civil Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment. Meanwhile, not only the courts, but the Executive, invariably recognized the validity of the Common Law Rule, and the Wong Kim Ark decision of 1897 merely restated it once for all.[20]

CONCERNING AMERICANS BORN ABROAD

There are certain elaborations and modifications of the two great principles mentioned above, serving both to confirm and circumscribe them. Children born abroad of American citizens in the foreign service of the United States government are citizens of the United States, and like citizenship comes by birth to children “born out of the limits and jurisdiction, whose fathers were or may be at the time of their birth citizens thereof.”[21] But the father must have been a citizen at the time of the birth of the child, and must have resided actually in the United States; that is, it will not do for him merely to have acquired citizenship abroad by the fact of the citizenship of his father without ever having resided in this country.

If the father loses his citizenship after the birth of the child, it has been held that such child upon attaining his majority may revive his right to citizenship by establishing residence here. And by virtue of legislation enacted in 1907, these foreign-born children of American parentage are required, upon reaching the age of eighteen, to register their intention to become residents, and to remain citizens, of the United States, and upon attaining majority to take the Oath of Allegiance to the United States.

The Department of State has been very liberal in interpreting this provision, allowing the declaration of intention to be made at any time after the person concerned has reached the age of eighteen, and before he has taken the oath, which may be at any reasonable time after his majority. The main question raised is that of good faith. Arises here the principle of “election of nationality”; many countries accord to a person thus in danger of what might be called “dual nationality” the right to choose. This is the case in France, Spain, Belgium, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Mexico, Chile, and Costa Rica. In Portugal, Italy, and France, failure to exercise this choice operates as a choice of citizenship there; in Spain, on the other hand, silence is construed as a choice of the foreign nationality. This is the purport of the American practice.[22]

CHILDREN BORN AT SEA

It is commonly believed that children of foreign parents born on the high seas under the American flag are as a matter of law “born in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” but this is not clearly the case. As Borchard puts it, the child “is probably an American citizen under our law and may also be a foreign subject jure sanguinis.” Hence he would, upon attaining majority, have a right of election.

QUESTION OF DUAL NATIONALITY

Can a person gain a new citizenship without losing the old? The aspirant for American citizenship is required in both his declaration of intention and his final petition for naturalization to abjure in most specific fashion not merely all other allegiances, but most particularly that from which he has come. But the sovereignty thus repudiated is not always willing to be abjured, and international diplomacy has been in the past much occupied with the tangles growing out of the question of “dual nationality.” For one not uncommon example, the child of alien parents born in the United States and thereby under our law a citizen of this country, may be taken in childhood back to his father’s native land, and upon reaching military age may be summoned to military service. The United States has not been prone to defend such persons when their actual residence in the old country was clear, but it has been maintained that upon the attainment of his majority such a person has the right to elect and re-establish his American citizenship.

The most common difficulties arise practically, however, from the fact that under the terms of his declaration to become a citizen of the United States, the alien repudiates his allegiance to his fatherland and its sovereignty, but does not gain, and cannot gain, for at least two years in any circumstances, a new citizenship. He has in most specific fashion flouted the government he had, but the government he desires to have will not protect him. For his practical uses, it is a question whether he has now two nationalities or none! Moreover, there have been countries and times in which the right to change allegiance was altogether denied.

In their attitude on the subject of voluntary expatriation the nations differ widely, and are divisible in this matter under three heads: those which deny the right altogether, those which permit it under certain conditions, and those which place no bar in the way.