Randolph
Bourne
Trans-National America
from
Atlantic Monthly, 118 (July 1916), 86-97
No reverberatory effect of the great war has
caused American public opinion more solicitude than the failure of the
"melting-pot." The discovery of diverse nationalistic feelings among
our great alien population his come to most people as an intense shock. It has
brought out the unpleasant inconsistencies of our traditional beliefs. We have
had to watch hard-hearted old Brahmins virtuously indignant at the spectacle of
the immigrant refusing to be melted, while they jeer at patriots like Mary
Antin who write about our "forefathers." We have had to listen to
publicists who express themselves as stunned by the evidence of vigorous
traditionalistic and cultural movements in this country among Germans,
Scandinavians, Bohemians and Poles, while in the same breath they insist that
the alien shall be forcibly assimilated to that Anglo-Saxon tradition which
they unquestionably label "American."
As the unpleasant truth has come upon us that
assimilation in this country was proceeding on lines very different from those
we had marked out for it, we found ourselves inclined to blame those who were
thwarting our prophecies. The truth became culpable. We blamed the war, we
blamed the Germans. And then we discovered with a moral shock that these
movements had been making great headway even before the war even began. We
found that the tendency, reprehensible and paradoxical as it might be, has been
for the national clusters of immigrants, as they became more and more firmly
established and more and more prosperous, to cultivate more and more
assiduously the literatures and cultural traditions of their homelands.
Assimilation, in other words, instead of washing out the memories of Europe, made
them more and more intensely real. Just as these clusters became more and more
objectively American, did they become more and more German or Scandinavian or
Bohemian or Polish.
To face the fact that our aliens are already
strong enough to take a share in the direction of their own destiny, and that
the strong cultural movements represented by the foreign press, schools, and
colonies are a challenge to our facile attempts, is not, however, to admit the
failure of Americanization. It is not to fear the failure of democracy. It is
rather to urge us to an investigation of what Americanism may rightly mean. It
is to ask ourselves whether our ideal has been broad or narrow--whether perhaps
the time has not come to assert a higher ideal than the "melting-pot"
Surely we cannot be certain of our spiritual democracy when, claiming to melt
the nations within us to a comprehension of our free and democratic
institutions, we fly into panic at the first sign of their own will and
tendency. We act as if we wanted Americanization to take place only on our own
terms, and not by the consent of the governed. All our elaborate machinery of
settlement and school and union, of social and political naturalization,
however, will move with friction just in so far as it neglects to take into
account this strong and virile insistence that America shall be what the
immigrant will have a hand in making it, and not what a ruling class,
descendant of those British stocks which were the first permanent immigrants,
decide that America shall be made. This is the condition which confronts us,
and which demands a clear and general readjustment of our attitude and our
ideal.
Mary Antin is right when she looks upon our
foreign-born as the people who missed the Mayflower and came over on the first
boat they could find. But she forgets that when they did come it was not upon
other Mayflowers, but upon a "Maiblume," a "Fleur de Mai,"
a "Fior di Maggio," a "Majblomst." These people were not
mere arrivals from the same family, to be welcomed as understood and
long-loved, but strangers to the neighborhood, with whom a long process of
settling down had to take place. For they brought with them their national and
racial characters, and each new national quota had to wear slowly away the
contempt with which its mere alienness got itself greeted. Each had to make its
way slowly from the lowest strata of unskilled labor up to a level where it
satisfied the accredited norms of social success.
We are all foreign-born or the descendants of
foreign-born, and if distinctions are to be made between us they should rightly
be on some other ground than indigenousness. The early colonists came over with
motives no less colonial than the later. They did not come to be assimilated in
an American melting-pot. They did not come to adopt the culture of the American
Indian. They had not the smallest intention of "giving themselves without
reservation" to the new country. They came to get freedom to live as they
wanted. They came to escape from the stifling air and chaos of the old world;
they came to make their fortune in a new land. They invented no new social
framework. Rather they brought over bodily the old ways to which they had been
accustomed. Tightly concentrated on a hostile frontier, they were conservative
beyond belief. Their pioneer daring was reserved for the objective conquest of
material resources. In their folkways, in their social and political
institutions, they were, like every colonial people, slavishly imitative of the
mother-country. So that, in spite of the "Revolution," our whole
legal and political system remained more English than the English, petrified
and unchanging, while in England law developed to meet the needs of the
changing times.
It is just this English-American conservatism that has been our chief
obstacle to social advance. We have needed the new peoples--the order of the
German and Scandinavian, the turbulence of the Slav and Hun--to save us from
our own stagnation. I do not mean that the illiterate Slav is now the equal of
the New Englander of pure descent. He is raw material to be educated, not into
a New Englander, but into a socialized American along such lines as those thirty nationalities are being educated in the
amazing schools of Gary. I do not believe that this process is to be one of
decades of evolution. The spectacle of Japan's sudden jump from mediaevalism to
post-modernism should have destroyed that superstition. We are not dealing with
individuals who are to "evolve." We are dealing with their children,
who, with that education we are about to have, will start level with all of us.
Let us cease to think of ideals like democracy as magical qualities inherent in
certain peoples. Let us speak, not of inferior races, but of inferior
civilizations. We are all to educate and to be educated. These peoples in
America are in a common enterprise. It is not what we are now that concerns us,
but what this plastic next generation may become in the light of a new
cosmopolitan ideal.
We are not dealing with static factors, but
with fluid and dynamic generations. To contrast the older and the newer
immigrants and see the one class as democratically motivated by love of
liberty, and the other by mere money-getting, is not to illuminate the future.
To think of earlier nationalities as culturally assimilated to America, while
we picture the later as a sodden and resistive mass, makes only for bitterness
and misunderstanding. There may be a difference between these earlier and these
later stocks, but it lies neither in motive for coming nor in strength of
cultural allegiance to the homeland. The truth is that no more tenacious
cultural allegiance to the mother country has been shown by any alien nation
than by the ruling class of Anglo-Saxon descendants in these American States.
English snobberies, English religion, English literary styles, English literary
reverences and canons, English ethics, English superiorities, have been the
cultural food that we have drunk in from our mothers' breasts. The
distinctively American spirit pioneer, as distinguished from the reminiscently
English that appears in Whitman and Emerson and James, has had to exist on
sufferance along side of this other cult, unconsciously belittled by our
cultural makers of opinion. No country has perhaps had so great indigenous
genius which had so little influence on the country's traditions and
expressions. The unpopular and dreaded German-American of the present day is a
beginning amateur in comparison with those foolish Anglophiles of Boston and
New York and Philadelphia whose reversion to cultural type sees uncritically in
England's cause the cause of Civilization, and, under the guise of ethical
independence of thought, carries along European traditions which are no more
American' than the German categories themselves.
It speaks well for German-American innocence
of heart or else for its lack of imagination that it has not turned the hyphen stigma into a "Tu
quoque!" If there were to be
any hyphens scattered about, clearly they
should he affixed to those English descendants who had had centuries of time to
be made American where the German had had only half a century.
Most significantly has the war brought out of them this alien virus, showing
them still loving English things, owing allegiance to the English Kultur, moved
by English shibboleths and prejudice. It is only because it has been the ruling class in this country
that bestowed the epithets that we have not heard copiously and scornfully of
"hyphenated English-Americans." But even our quarrels with England
have had the bad temper, the
extravagance, of family quarrels. The Englishman of to-day nags us and dislikes
us in that personal, peculiarly intimate way in which he dislikes the
Australian, or as we may dislike our younger brothers. He still thinks of us
incorrigibly as "colonials." America---official, controlling,
literary, political America--is still, as a writer recently expressed it, "culturally speaking, ,a self-governing dominion
of the British Empire."
The non-English American can scarcely be
blamed if he sometimes thinks of the Anglo-Saxon predominance in America as
little more than a predominance of priority. The Anglo-Saxon was merely the
first immigrant, the first to found a colony. He has never really ceased to be
the descendant of immigrants, nor has he ever succeeded in transforming that
colony into a real nation, with a tenacious, richly woven fabric of native
culture. Colonials from the other nations have come and settled down beside
him. They found no definite native culture which should startle them out of
their colonialism, and consequently they looked back to their mother-country,
as the earlier Anglo-Saxon immigrant was looking back to his. What has been
offered thee newcomer has been the chance to learn English, to become a
citizen, to salute the flag. And those elements of our ruling classes who are
responsible for the public schools, the settlements, all the organizations for
amelioration in the cities, have every reason to be proud of the care and labor
which they have devoted to absorbing the immigrant. His opportunities the
immigrant has taken to gladly, with almost a pathetic eagerness to make his way
in the new land without friction or disturbance. The common language has made
not only for the necessary communication, but for all the amenities of life.
If freedom means the right to do pretty much
as one pleases, so long as one does not
interfere with others, the immigrant has found freedom, and the ruling element
has been singularly liberal in its treatment of the invading hordes. But if
freedom means a democratic cooperation in determining the ideals and purposes and industrial and social
institutions of a country, then
the immigrant has not been free, and
the Anglo-Saxon element is guilty of just what every dominant race is guilty of
in every European country: the imposition of its own culture upon the minority
peoples. The fact that this imposition has been so mild and, indeed, semi-conscious does not alter its quality. And the war has brought out just the degree
to which that purpose of "Americanizing," that is,
"Anglo-Saxonizing," the immigrant has failed.
For the Anglo-Saxon now in his bitterness to
turn upon the other peoples, talk about their "arrogance," scold them
for not being melted in a pot which never
existed, is to betray the unconscious purpose which lay at the bottom of his heart. It betrays too
the possession of a racial
jealousy similar to that of which he
is now accusing the so-called "hyphenates." Let the Anglo-Saxon be
proud enough of the heroic toil and heroic sacrifices which moulded the nation.
But let him ask himself, if he had had to depend on the English descendants, where he would have been living to-day.
To those of us who see in the
exploitation of unskilled labor the strident red leit-motif of our
civilization, the settling of the country presents a great social drama as the
waves of immigration broke over it.
Let the Anglo-Saxon ask himself where he
would have been if these races had not come? Let those who feel the inferiority
of the non-Anglo-Saxon immigrant contemplate that region of the States which
has remained the most distinctively
"American," the South. Let him ask himself whether he would really like to see the foreign hordes
Americanized into such an
Americanization. Let him ask himself how superior this native civilization is to the great "alien"
states of Wisconsin and Minnesota, where
Scandinavians, Poles, and Germans have self-consciously labored to preserve
their traditional culture, while being outwardly and satisfactorily American.
Let him ask himself how much more wisdom, intelligence, industry and social
leadership has come out of these alien states than out of all the truly
American ones. The South, in fact, while this vast Northern development has
gone on, still remains an English
colony, stagnant and complacent, having progressed scarcely beyond the early
Victorian era. It is culturally sterile because it has had no advantage of
cross-fertilization like the Northern states. What has happened in states such
as Wisconsin and Minnesota is that strong foreign cultures have struck root in
a new and fertile soil. America has meant liberation, and German and
Scandinavian political ideas and social energies have expanded to a new
potency. The process has not been at all the fancied "assimilation"
of the Scandinavian or Teuton. Rather has it been a process of their
assimilation of us--I speak as an Anglo-Saxon. The foreign cultures have not
been melted down or run together, made into some homogeneous Americanism, but
have remained distinct but cooperating to the greater glory and benefit, not
only of themselves but of all the native "Americanism" around them.
What we emphatically do not want is that
these distinctive qualities should be washed out into a tasteless, colorless
fluid of uniformity. Already we have far too much of this insipidity, masses of
people who are cultural half-breeds, neither assimilated Anglo-Saxons nor
nationals of another culture. Each national colony in this country seems to
retain in its foreign press, its vernacular literature, its schools, its intellectual
and patriotic leaders, a central cultural nucleus. From this nucleus the colony
extends out by imperceptible gradations to a fringe where national
characteristics are all but lost. Our cities are filled with these half-breeds
who retain their foreign names but have lost the foreign savor. This does not
mean that they have actually been changed into New Englanders or Middle
Westerners. It does not mean that they have been really Americanized. It means
that, letting slip from them whatever native culture they had, they have
substituted for it only the most rudimentary American --the American culture of
the cheap newspaper, the "movies," the popular song, the ubiquitous
automobile. The unthinking who survey this class call them assimilated,
Americanized. The great American public school has done its work. .With these
people our institutions are safe. We may thrill with dread at the aggressive
hyphenate, but this tame flabbiness is accepted as Americanization. The same
moulders of opinion whose ideal is to melt the different races into Anglo-Saxon
gold hail this poor product as the satisfying result of their alchemy.
Yet a truer cultural sense would have told us
that it is not the self-conscious cultural nuclei that sap at our American
life, but these fringes. It is not the Jew who sticks proudly to the faith of
his fathers and boasts of that venerable culture of his who is dangerous to
America, but the Jew who has lost the Jewish fire and become a mere elementary
grasping animal. It is not the Bohemian who supports the Bohemian schools in
Chicago whose influence is sinister, but the Bohemian who has made money and
has got into ward politics. Just so surely as we tend to disintegrate these
nuclei of nationalistic culture do we tend to create hordes of men and women
without a spiritual country, cultural outlaws, without taste, without standards
but those of the mob. We sentence them to live on the most rudimentary planes
of American life. The influences at the centre of the nuclei are centripetal.
They make for the intelligence and the social values which mean an enhancement
of life. And just because the foreign-born retains this expressiveness is he
likely to be a better citizen of the American community. The influences at the
fringe, however, are centrifugal, anarchical. They make for detached fragments
of peoples. Those who came to find liberty achieve only license. They become
the flotsam and jetsam of American life, the downward undertow of our
civilization with its leering cheapness and falseness of taste and spiritual
outlook, the absence of mind and sincere feeling which we see iii our slovenly
towns, our vapid moving pictures, our popular novels, and in the vacuous faces
of the crowds on the city street. This is the cultural wreckage of our time,
and it is from the fringes of the Anglo-Saxon as well as the other stocks that
it falls. America has as yet no impelling integrating force. It makes too
easily for this detritus of cultures. In our loose, free country, no
constraining national purpose, no tenacious folk-tradition and folk-style hold
the people to a line.
The war has shown us that not in any magical
formula will this purpose be found. No intense nationalism of the European plan
can be ours. But do we not begin to see a new and more adventurous ideal? Do we
not see how the national colonies in America, deriving power from the deep
cultural heart of Europe and yet living here in mutual toleration, freed from
the age-long tangles of races, creeds, and dynasties, may work out a federated
ideal? America is transplanted Europe, but a Europe that has not been
disintegrated and scattered in the transplanting as in some Dispersion. Its
colonies live here inextricably mingled, yet not homogeneous. They merge but
they do not fuse.
America is a unique sociological fabric, and
it bespeaks poverty of imagination not to be thrilled at the incalculable
potentialities of so novel a union of men. To seek no other goal than the weary
old nationalism, belligerent, exclusive, inbreeding, the poison of which we are
witnessing now in Europe, is to make patriotism a hollow sham, and to declare
that, in spite of our boastings, America must ever be a follower and not a
leader of nations.
II
If we come to find this point of view
plausible, we shall have to give up the search for our native
"American" culture. With the exception of the South and that New
England which, like the Red Indian, seems to be passing into solemn oblivion,
there is no distinctively American culture. It is apparently our lot rather to
be a federation of cultures. This we have been for half a century, and the war
has made it evermore evident that this is what we are destined to remain. This
will not mean, however, that there are not expressions of indigenous genius
that could not have sprung from any other soil. Music, poetry, philosophy, have
been singularly fertile and new. Strangely enough, American genius has flared
forth just in those directions which are least [understood] of the people. If
the American note is bigness, action, the objective as contrasted with the
reflective life, where is the epic expression of this spirit? Our drama and our
fiction, the peculiar fields for the expression of action and objectivity, are
somehow exactly the fields of the spirit which remain poor and mediocre.
American materialism is in some way inhibited from getting into impressive
artistic form its own energy with which it bursts. Nor is it any better in
architecture, the least romantic and subjective of all the arts. We are
inarticulate of the very values which we profess to idealize. But in the finer
forms --music, verse, the essay, philosophy--the American genius puts forth
work equal to any of its contemporaries. Just in so far as our American genius
has expressed the pioneer spirit, the adventurous, forward-looking drive of a
colonial empire, is it representative of that whole--America of the many races
and peoples, and not of any partial or traditional enthusiasm. And only as that
pioneer note is sounded can we really speak of the American culture. As long as
we thought of Americanism in terms of the "melting pot," our American
cultural tradition lay in the past. It was something to which the new Americans
were to be moulded. In the light of our changing ideal of Americanism, we must
perpetrate the paradox that our American cultural tradition lies in the future.
It will be what we all together make out of this incomparable opportunity of
attacking the future with a new key.
Whatever American nationalism turns out to be,
it is certain to become something utterly different from the nationalisms of
twentieth-century Europe. This wave of reactionary enthusiasm to play the
orthodox nationalistic game which is passing over the country is scarcely vital
enough to last. We cannot swagger and thrill to the same national self-feeling.
We must give new edges to our pride. We must be content to avoid the unnumbered
woes that national patriotism has brought in Europe, and that fiercely
heightened pride and self-consciousness. Alluring as this is, we must allow our
imaginations to transcend this scarcely veiled belligerency. We can be serenely
too proud to fight if our pride embraces the creative forces of civilization
which armed contest nullifies. We can be too proud to fight if our code of
honor transcends that of the schoolboy on the playground surrounded by his
jeering mates. Our honor must be positive and creative, and not the mere
jealous and negative protectiveness against metaphysical violations of our
technical rights. When the doctrine is put forth that in one American flows the
mystic blood of all our country's sacred honor, freedom, and prosperity, so
that an injury to him is to be the signal for turning our whole nation into
that clan-feud of horror and reprisal which would be war, then we find
ourselves back among the musty schoolmen of the Middle Ages, and not in any
pragmatic and realistic America of the twentieth century.
We should hold our gaze to what America has
done, not what mediaeval codes of dueling she has failed to observe. We have
transplanted European modernity to our soil, without the spirit that inflames
it and turns all its energy into mutual destruction. Out of these foreign
peoples there has somehow been squeezed the poison. Ann America, "hyphenated"
to bitterness is somehow non-explosive. For, even if we all hark back in
sympathy to a European nation, even if the war has set every one vibrating to
some emotional string twanged on the other side of the Atlantic, the effect has
been one of almost dramatic harmlessness.
What we have really been witnessing, however
unappreciatively, in this country has been a thrilling and bloodless battle of
Kulturs. In that arena of friction which has been the most dramatic--between
the hyphenated German-American and the hyphenated English-American--there have
emerged rivalries of philosophies which show up deep traditional attitudes,
points of view which accurately reflect the gigantic issues of the war. America
has mirrored the spiritual issues. The vicarious struggle has been played out
peacefully here in the mind. We have seen the stout resistiveness of the old
moral interpretation of history on which Victorian England thrived and made
itself great in its own esteem. The clean and immensely satisfying vision of
the war as a contest between right and wrong; the enthusiastic support of the
Allies as the incarnation of virtue on a rampage; the fierce envisaging of
their selfish national purposes as the ideals of justice, freedom and
democracy--all this has been thrown with intensest force against the German
realistic interpretations in terms of the struggle for power and the virility
of the integrated State. America has been the intellectual battleground of the
nations.
The failure of the melting-pot, far from
closing the great American democratic experiment, means that it has only just
begun. Whatever American nationalism turns out to be, we see already that it
will have color richer and more exciting than our ideal has hitherto
encompassed. In a world which has dreamed of internationalism, we find that we
have all unawares been building up the first international nation. The voices
which have cried for a tight and jealous nationalism of the European pattern
are failing. From that ideal, however valiantly and disinterestedly it has been
set for us, time and tendency have moved us further and further away. What we
have achieved has been rather a cosmopolitan federation of national colonies,
of foreign cultures, from whom the sting of devastating competition has been
removed. America is already the world-federation in miniature, the continent
where for the first time in history has been achieved that miracle of hope, the
peaceful living side by side, with character substantially preserved, of the
most heterogeneous peoples under the sun. Nowhere else has such contiguity been
anything but the breeder of misery. Here, notwithstanding our tragic failures
of adjustment, the outlines are already too clear not t
III
o give us a new vision and a new-orientation
of the American mind in the world.
It is for the American of the younger
generation to accept this cosmopolitanism, and carry it along with
self-conscious and fruitful purpose. In his colleges, he is already getting,
with the study of modern history and politics, the modern literatures, economic
geography, the privilege of a cosmopolitan outlook such as the people of no
other nation of to-day in Europe can possibly secure. If he is still a
colonial, he is no longer the colonial of one partial culture, but of many. He
is a colonial of the world. Colonialism has grown into cosmopolitanism, and his
motherland is no one nation, but all who have anything life enhancing to offer
to the spirit. That vague sympathy which the France of ten years ago was
feeling for the world--a sympathy which was drowned in the terrible reality of
war--may be the modern American's, and that in a positive and aggressive sense.
If the American is parochial, it is in sheer wantonness or cowardice. His
provincialism is the measure of his fear of bogies or the defect of his
imagination.
Indeed, it is not uncommon for the eager
Anglo-Saxon who goes to a vivid American university to-day to find his true
friends not among his own race but among the acclimatized German or Austrian,
the acclimatized Jew, the acclimatized Scandinavian or Italian. In them he
finds the cosmopolitan note. In these youths, foreign-born or the children of
foreign-born parents, he is likely to find many of his old inbred morbid
problems washed away. These friends are oblivious to the repressions of that
tight little society in which he so provincially grew up. He has a pleasurable
sense of liberation from the stale and familiar attitudes of those whose
ingrowing culture has scarcely created anything vital for his America of
to-day. He breathes a larger air. In his new enthusiasms for continental
literature, for unplumbed Russian depths, for French clarity of thought, for
Teuton philosophies of power, he feels himself citizen of a larger world. He
may be absurdly superficial, his outward-reaching wonder may ignore all the
stiller and homelier virtues of his Anglo-Saxon home, but he has at least found
the clue to that international mind which will be essential to all men and
women of good-will if they are ever to save this Western world of ours from suicide.
His new friends have gone through a similar revolution. America has burned most
of the baser metal also from them. Meeting now with this common American
background, all of them may yet retain that distinctiveness of their native
cultures and their national spiritual slants. They are more valuable and
interesting to each other for being different, yet that difference could not be
creative were it not for this new cosmopolitan outlook which America has given
:- - them and which they all equally possess.
A college where such a spirit is possible
even to the smallest degree, has within itself already the seeds of this
international intellectual world of the future. It suggests that the
contribution of America will be an intellectual internationalism which goes far
beyond the mere exchange of scientific ideas and discoveries and the cold
recording of facts. It will be an intellectual sympathy which is not satisfied
until it has got at the heart of the different cultural expressions, and felt
as they feel. It may have immense preferences, but it will make understanding
and not indignation its end. Such a sympathy will unite and not divide. Against
the thinly disguised panic which calls itself "patriotism" and the
thinly disguised militarism which calls itself "preparedness" the
cosmopolitan ideal is set. This does not mean that those who hold it are for a
policy of drift. They, too, long passionately for an integrated and disciplined
America. But they do not want one which is integrated only for domestic economic
exploitation of the workers or for predatory economic imperialism among the
weaker peoples. They do not want one that is integrated by coercion or
militarism, or for the truculent assertion of a mediæval code of honor and of
doubtful rights. They believe that the most effective integration will be one
which coordinates the diverse elements and turns them consciously toward
working out together the place of America in the world-situation. They demand
for integration a genuine integrity, a wholeness and soundness of enthusiasm
and purpose which can only come when no national colony within our America
feels that it is being discriminated against or that its cultural case is being
prejudged. This strength of cooperation, this feeling that all who are here may
have a hand in the destiny of America, will make for a finer spirit of
integration than any narrow "Americanism" or forced chauvinism. In
this effort we may have to accept some form of that dual citizenship which
meets with so much articulate horror among us. Dual citizenship we may have to
recognize as the rudimentary form of that international citizenship to which,
if our words mean anything, we aspire. We have assumed unquestioningly that
mere participation in the political life of the United States must cut the new
citizen off from all sympathy with his old allegiance. Anything but a bodily
transfer of devotion from one sovereignty to another has been viewed as a sort
of moral treason against the Republic. We have insisted that the immigrant whom
we welcomed escaping from the very exclusive nationalism of his European home
shall forthwith adopt a nationalism just as exclusive, just as narrow, and even
less legitimate because it is founded on no warm traditions of his own. Yet a
nation like France is said to permit a formal and legal dual citizenship even
at the present time. Though a citizen of hers may pretend to cast off his
allegiance in favor of some other sovereignty, he is still subject to her laws
when he returns. Once a citizen, always a citizen, no matter how many
new-citizenships he may embrace. And such a dual citizenship seems to us sound
and right. For it recognizes that, although the Frenchman may accept the formal
institutional framework of his new country and indeed become intensely loyal to
it, yet his Frenchness he will never lose. What makes up the fabric of his soul
will always be of this Frenchness,-so that unless he becomes utterly degenerate
he will always to some degree dwell still in his native environment.
Indeed, does not the cultivated American who
goes to Europe practice a dual citizenship, which, if not formal, is no less
real? The American who lives abroad may be the least expatriate of men. If he
falls in love with French ways and French thinking and French democracy and seeks
to saturate himself with the new spirit, he is guilty of at least a dual
spiritual citizenship. He may be still American, yet he feels himself through
sympathy also a Frenchman. And he finds that this expansion involves no
shameful conflict within him, no surrender of his native attitude. He has
rather for the first time caught a glimpse of the cosmopolitan spirit. And
after wandering about through many
races and civilizations he may return to America to find them all here living
vividly and crudely, seeking the same adjustment that he made. He sees the new
peoples here with a new vision. They are no longer masses of aliens, waiting to
be "assimilated," waiting to be melted down into the indistinguishable dough of Anglo-Saxonism. They are
rather threads of living and potent cultures, blindly striving to weave
themselves into a novel international nation, the first the world has seen. In an Austria-Hungary or a
Prussia the stronger of these cultures would be moving almost instinctively to
subjugate the weaker. But in
America those wills-to-power are turned in a different direction into learning
how to live together.
Along with dual citizenship we shall have to
accept, I think, that free and mobile passage of the immigrant between America
and his native land again which now arouses so much prejudice among us. We
shall have to accept the immigrant's return for the same reason that we
consider justified our own flitting about the earth. To stigmatize the alien
who works in America for a few years and returns to his own land, only perhaps
to seek American fortune again, is to think in narrow nationalistic terms. It
is to ignore the cosmopolitan significance of this migration. It is to ignore
the fact that the returning immigrant is often a missionary to an inferior
civilization.
This migratory habit has been especially
common with the unskilled laborers who have been pouring into the United States
in the last dozen years from every country in southeastern Europe. Many of them
return to spend their earnings in their own country or to serve their country
in war. But they return with an entirely new critical outlook, and a sense of
the superiority of American organization to the primitive living around them.
This continued passage to and fro has already raised the material standard of
living in many regions of these backward countries. For these regions are thus
endowed with exactly what they need, the capital for the exploitation of their
natural resources, and the spirit of enterprise. America is thus educating
these laggard peoples from the very bottom of society up, awakening vast masses
to a new-born hope for the future. In the migratory Greek, therefore, we have
not the parasitic alien, the doubtful American asset, but a symbol of that
cosmopolitan interchange which is coming, in spite of all war and national
exclusiveness.
Only America, by reason of the unique liberty
of opportunity and traditional isolation for which she seems to stand, can lead
in this cosmopolitan enterprise. Only the American--and in this category I
include the migratory alien who has lived with us and caught the pioneer
"spirit and a sense of new social vistas--has the chance to become that citizen of the world. America is
coming to be, not a nationality but a transnationality, a weaving back and
forth, with the other lands, of many threads of all sizes and colors. Any
movement which attempts to thwart this weaving, or to dye the fabric any one
color, or disentangle the threads of the strands, is false to this cosmopolitan
vision. I do not mean that we shall necessarily glut ourselves with the raw
product of humanity. It would he folly to absorb the nations faster than we
could weave them. We have no duty
either to admit or reject. It is purely a question of expediency. What concerns
us is the fact that the strands are here. We must have a policy and an ideal
for an actual situation. Our question is, What shall we do with our America?
How are we likely to get the more creative America by confining our
imaginations to the ideal of the melting-pot, or broadening them to some such
cosmopolitan conception as I have been vaguely sketching?
The war has shown America to be unable,
though isolated geographically and politically from a European world-situation,
to remain aloof and irresponsible She is a wandering star in a sky dominated by
two colossal constellations of states. Can she not work out some position of
her own, some life of being in, yet not quite of, this seething and embroiled
European world? This is her only hope and promise. A trans-nationality of all
the nations, it is spiritually impossible for her to pass into the orbit of any
one. It will be folly to hurry herself into a premature and sentimental
nationalism, or to emulate Europe and play fast and loose with the forces that
drag into war. No Americanization will fulfill this vision which does not
recognize the uniqueness of this trans-nationalism of ours. The Anglo-Saxon
attempt to fuse will only create enmity and distrust. The crusade against
"hyphenates" will only inflame the partial patriotism of
trans-nationals, and cause them to assert their European traditions in strident
and unwholesome ways. But the attempt to weave a wholly novel international
nation out of our chaotic America will liberate and harmonize the creative
power of all these peoples and give them the new spiritual citizenship, as so
many individuals have already been given, of a world.
Is it a wild hope that the undertow of
opposition to metaphysics in international relations, opposition to militarism,
is less a cowardly provincialism than a groping for this higher cosmopolitan
ideal? One can understand the irritated restlessness with which our proud
pro-British colonists contemplate a heroic conflict across the seas in which
they have no part. It was inevitable that our necessary inaction should evolve
in their minds into the bogey of national shame and dishonor. But let us be
careful about accepting their sensitiveness as final arbiter. Let us look at
our reluctance rather as the first crude beginnings of assertion on the part of
certain strands in our nationality that they have a right to a voice in the
construction of the American ideal. Let us face realistically the America we
have around us. Let us work with the forces that are at work. Let us make
something of this trans-national spirit instead of outlawing it. Already we are
living this cosmopolitan America. What we need is everywhere a vivid
consciousness of the new ideal. Deliberate headway must be made against the
survivals of the melting-pot ideal for the promise of American life.
We cannot Americanize America worthily by
sentimentalizing and moralizing history. When the best schools are expressly
renouncing the questionable duty of teaching patriotism by means of history, it
is not the time to force shibboleth upon the immigrant. This form of
Americanization has been heard because it appealed to the vestiges of our old
sentimentalized and moralized patriotism. This has so far held the field as the
expression of the new American's new devotion. The inflections of other voices
have been drowned. They must be heard. We must see if the lesson of the war has
not been for hundreds of these later Americans a vivid realization of their
transnationality, a new consciousness of what America meant to them as a
citizenship in the world. It is the vague historic idealisms which have
provided the fuel for the European flame. Our American ideal can make no
progress until we do away with this romantic gilding of the past.
All our idealisms must be those of future
social goals in which all can participate, the good life of personality lived
in the environment of the Beloved Community. No mere doubtful triumphs of the
past, which redound to the glory of only one of our trans-nationalities, can
satisfy us. It must be a future America, on which all can unite, which pulls us
irresistibly toward it, as we understand each other more warmly.
To make real this striving amid dangers and
apathies is work for a younger intelligensia of America. Here is an enterprise
of integration into which we can all pour ourselves, of a spiritual welding
which should make us, if the final menace ever came, not weaker, but infinitely
strong.
Prepared by:
Robert Bannister (rbannis1@swarthmore.edu) on 6/30/95. Corrections entered
6/6/01. Please report additional typos or other errors by e-mail.