Essay : "Trans-national America" by Randolph Bourne
Source : http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1916/07/trans-national-america/304838/2/?single_page=true
No reverberatory effect of the great war has caused
American public opinion more solicitude than the failure of the
'melting- pot.' The discovery of diverse nationalistic feelings among
our great alien population has come to most people as an intense shock.
It has brought out the unpleasant inconsistencies of our traditional
beliefs We have had to watch hard- hearted old Brahmins virtuously
indignant at the spectacle of the immigrant refusing to be melted, while
they jeer at patriots like Mary Antin who write about 'our
forefathers.' We have had to listen to publicists who express themselves
as stunned by the evidence of vigorous nationalistic and cultural
movements in this country among Germans, Scandinavians, Bohemians, and
Poles, while in the same breath they insist that the mien shall be
forcibly assimilated to that Anglo- Saxon tradition which they
unquestioningly label 'American.'
As the unpleasant truth has come upon us that assimilation in this
country was proceeding on lines very different from those we had marked
out for it, we found ourselves inclined to blame those who were
thwarting our prophecies. The truth became culpable. We blamed the war,
we blamed the Germans. And then we discovered with a moral shock that
these movements had been making great headway before the war even began.
We found that the tendency, reprehensible and paradoxical as it might
be, has been for the national clusters of immigrants, as they became
more and more firmly established and more and more prosperous, to
cultivate more and more assiduously the literatures and cultural
traditions of their homelands. Assimilation, in other words, instead of
washing out the memories of Europe, made them more and more intensely
real. Just as these clusters became more and more objectively American,
did they become more and more German or Scandinavian or Bohemian or
Polish.
To face the fact that our aliens are already strong enough to take a
share in the direction of their own destiny, and that the strong
cultural movements represented by the foreign press, schools, and
colonies are a challenge to our facile attempts, is not, however, to
admit the failure of Americanization. It is not to fear the failure of
democracy. It is rather to urge us to an investigation of what
Americanism may rightly mean. It is to ask ourselves whether our ideal
has been broad or narrow—whether perhaps the time has not come to assert
a higher ideal than the 'melting- pot.' Surely we cannot be certain of
our spiritual democracy when, claiming to melt the nations within us to a
comprehension of our free and democratic institutions, we fly into
panic at the first sign of their own will and tendency. We act as if we
wanted Americanization to take place only on our own terms, and not by
the consent of the governed. All our elaborate machinery of settlement
and school and union, of social and political naturalization, however,
will move with friction just in so far as it neglects to take into
account this strong and virile insistence that America shall be what the
immigrant will have a hand in making it, and not what a ruling class,
descendant of those British stocks which were the first permanent
immigrants, decide that America shall be made. This is the condition
which confronts us, and which demands a clear and general readjustment
of our attitude and our ideal.
I
Mary Antin is right when she looks upon our foreign- born
as the people who missed the Mayflower and came over on the first boat
they could find. But she forgets that when they did come it was not upon
other Mayflower but upon a 'Fleur,' a 'Fleur de Mai,' a 'Fleur di
Maggio,' a 'Majblomst.' These people were not mere arrivals from the
same family, to be welcomed as understood and long-loved but strangers
to the neighborhood, with whom a long process of settling down had to
take place. For they brought with them their national and racial
characters, and each new national quota had to wear slowly away the
contempt with which its mere alienness got itself greeted. Each had to
make its way slowly from the lowest strata of unskilled labor up to a
level where it satisfied the accredited norms of social success.
We are all foreign-born or the descendants of foreign-born,and if
distinctions are to be made between us, they should rightly be on some
other ground than indigenousness. The early colonists came over with
motives no less colonial than the later. They did not come to be
assimilated in an American melting pot. They did not come to adopt the
culture of the American Indian. They had not the smallest intention of
'giving themselves without reservation' to the new country. They came to
get freedom to live as they wanted to. They came to escape from the
stifling air and chaos of the old world; they came to make their fortune
in a new land. They invented no new social framework. Rather they
brought over bodily the old ways to which they had been accustomed.
Tightly concentrated on a hostile frontier, they were conservative
beyond belief. Their pioneer daring was reserved for the objective
conquest of material resources. In their folkways, in their social and
political institutions, they were, like every colonial people, slavishly
imitative of the mother country. So that, in spite of the 'Revolution,'
our whole legal and political system remained more English than the
English, petrified and unchanging, while in England law developed to
meet the needs of the changing times.
It is just this English-Americanconservatism that has been our
chief obstacle to social advance. We have needed the new peoples—the
order of the German and Scandinavian, the turbulence of the Slav and
Hun—to save us from our own stagnation. I do not mean that the
illiterate Slav is now the equal of the New Englander of pure descent.
He is raw material to be educated, not into a New Englander, but into a
socialized American along such lines as those thirty nationalities are
being educated in the amazing school of Gary. I do not believe that this
process is to be one of decades of evolution. The spectacle of Japan's
sudden jump from medievalism to post- modernism should have destroyed
the superstition. We are not dealing with individuals who are to
'evolve.' We are dealing with their children, who with that education we
are about to have, will start level with all of us. Let us cease to
think of ideals like democracy as magical qualities inherent in certain
peoples. Let us speak, not of inferior races, but of inferior
civilizations. We are all to educate and to be educated. These peoples
in America are in a common enterprise. It is not what we are now that
concerns us, but what this plastic next generation may become in the
light of a new cosmopolitan ideal.
We are not dealing with static factors, but with fluid and dynamic
generations. To contrast the older and the newer immigrants and see the
one class as democratically motivated by love of liberty, and the other
by mere money- getting, is not to illuminate the future. To think of
earlier nationalities as culturally assimilated to America, while we
picture the later as a sodden and resistive mass, makes only for
bitterness and misunderstanding. There may be a difference between these
earlier and these later stocks, but it lies neither in motive for
coming nor in strength of cultural allegiance to the homeland. The truth
is that no more tenacious cultural allegiance to the mother country has
been shown by any alien nation than by the ruling class of Anglo- Saxon
descendants in these American States. English snobberies, English
religion, English literary styles, English literary reverences and
canons, English ethics, English superiorities, have been the cultural
food that we have drunk in from our mothers' breasts. The distinctively
American spirit—pioneer, as distinguished from the reminiscently
English—that appears in Whitman and Emerson and James, has had to exist
on sufferance alongside of this other cult, unconsciously belittled by
our cultural makers of opinion. No country has perhaps had so great
indigenous genius which had so little influence on the country's
traditions and expressions. The unpopular and dreaded German- American
of the present day is a beginning amateur in comparison with those
foolish Anglophiles of Boston and New York and Philadelphia whose
reversion to cultural type sees uncritically in England's cause the
cause of Civilization, and, under the guise of ethical indepenence of
thought, carries along European traditions which are no more 'American'
than the German categories themselves.
It speaks well for German- American innocence of heart or else for
its lack of imagination that it has not turned the hyphen stigma into a
'Tu quoque!' If there were to be any hyphens scattered about, clearly
they should be affixed to those English descendants who had had
centuries of time to be made American where the German had had only half
a century. Most significantly has the war brought out of them this
alien virus, showing them still loving English things, owing allegiance
to the English Kultur, moved by English shibboleths and prejudice. It is
only because it has been the ruling class in this country that bestowed
the epithet that we have not heard copiously and scornfully of
'hyphenated English Americans.' But even our quarrels with England have
had the bad temper, the extravagance, of family quarrels. The Englishman
of to- day nags us and dislikes us in that personal, peculiarly
intimate way in which he dislikes the Australian, or as we may dislike
our younger brothers. He still thinks of us incorrigibly as 'colonials.'
America—official, controlling, literary, political America—is still, as
a writer recently expressed it, 'culturally speaking, a self- governing
dominion of the British Empire.'
The non- English American can scarcely be blamed if he sometimes
thinks of the Anglo- Saxon predominance in America as little more than a
predominance of priority. The Anglo-Saxon was merely the first
immigrant, the first to found a colony. He has never really ceased to be
the descendant of immigrants, nor has he ever succeeded in transforming
that colony into a real nation, with a tenacious, richly woven frabric
of native culture. Colonials from the other nations have come and
settled down beside him. They found no definite native culture which
should startle them out of their colonialism, and consequently they
looked back to their mother- country, as the earlier Anglo- Saxon
immigrant was looking back to his. What has been offered the newcomer
has been the chance to learn English, to become a citizen, to salute the
flag. And those elements of our ruling classes who are responsible for
the public schools, the settlements, all the organizations for
amelioration in the cities, have every reason to be proud of the care
and labor which they ve devoted to absorbing the immigrant. His
opportunities the immigrant has taken to gladly, with almost pathetic
eagerness to make his way in the new land without friction or
disturbance. The common language has made not only for the necessary
communication, but for all the amenities of life.
If freedom means the right to do pretty much as one pleases, so
long as one does not interfere with others, the immigrant has found
freedom, and the ruling element has been singularly liberal in its
treatment of the invading hordes. But if freedom means a democratic
cooperation in determining the ideals and purposes and industrial and
social institutions of a country, then the immigrant has not been free,
and Anglo- Saxon element is guilty of just what every dominant race is
guilty of in every European country: the imposition of its own culture
upon the minority peoples. The fact that this imposition has been so
mild and, indeed, semi- conscious does not alter its quality. And the
war has brought out just the degree to which that purpose of
'Americanizing,' that is, 'Anglo-Saxonizing,' the immigrant has failed.
For the Anglo- Saxon now in his bitterness to turn upon the other
peoples, talk about their 'arrogance,' scold them for not being melted
in a pot which never existed, is to betray the unconscious purpose which
lay at the bottom of his heart. It betrays too the possession of a
racial jealousy similar to that of which he is now accusing the so
called 'hyphenates.' Let the Anglo Saxon be proud enough of the heroic
toil and heroic sacrifices which moulded the nation. But let him ask
himself, if he had had to depend on the English descendants, where he
would have been living to- day. To those of us who see in the
exploitation of unskilled labor the strident red leit- motif of our
civilization, the settling of the country presents a great social drama
as the waves of immigration broke over it.
Let the Anglo- Saxon ask himself where he would have been if these
races had not come? Let those who feel the inferiority of the non-
Anglo-Saxon immigrant contemplate that region of the States which has
remained the most distinctively 'American,' the South. Let him ask
himself whether he would really like to see the foreign hordes
Americanized into such an Americanization. Let him ask himself how
superior this native civilization is to the great 'alien' states of
Wisconsin and Minnesota, where Scandinavians, Poles, and Germans have
self- consciously labored to preserve their traditional culture, while
being outwardly and satisfactorily American. Let him ask himself how
much more wisdom, intelligence, industry and social leadership has come
out of these alien states than out of all the truly American ones. The
South, in fact, while this vast Northern development has gone on, still
remains an English colony, stagnant and complacent, having progressed
culturally scarcely beyond the early Victorian era. It is culturally
sterile because it has had no advantage of cross- fertilization like the
Northern states. What has happened in states such as Wisconsin and
Minnesota is that strong foreign cultures have struck root in a new and
fertile soil. America has meant liberation, and German and Scandinavian
political ideas and social energies have expanded to a new potency. The
process has not been at all the fancied 'assimilation' of the
Scandinavian or Teuton. Rather has it been a process of their
assimilation of us—I speak as an Anglo- Saxon. The foreign cultures have
not been melted down or run together, made into some homogeneous
Americanism, but have remained distinct but cooperating to the greater
glory and benefit not only of themselves but of all the native
'Americanism' around them.
What we emphatically do not want is that these distinctive
qualities should be washed out into a tasteless, colorless fluid of
uniformity. Already we have far too much of this insipidity,—masses of
people who are cultural half- breeds, neither assimilated Anglo-Saxons
nor nationals of another culture. Each national colony in this country
seems to retain in its foreign press, its vernacular literature, its
schools, its intellectual and patriotic leaders, a central cultural
nucleus. From this nucleus the colony extends out by imperceptible
gradations to a fringe where national characteristics are all but lost.
Our cities are filled with these half- breeds who retain their foreign
names but have lost the foreign savor. This does not mean that they have
actually been changed into New Englanders or MiddleWesterners. It does
not mean that they have been really Americanized. It means that, letting
slip from them whatever native culture they had, they have substituted
for it only the most rudimentary American—the American culture of the
cheap newspaper, the 'movies,' the popular song, the ubiquitous
automobile. The unthinking who survey this class call them assimilated,
Americanized. The great American public school has done its work. With
these people our institutions are safe. We may thrill with dread at the
aggressive hyphenate, but this tame flabbiness is accepted as
Americanization. The same moulders of opinion whose ideal is to melt the
different races into Anglo-Saxon gold hail this poor product as the
satisfying result of their alchemy.
Yet a truer cultural sense would have told us that it is not the
self- conscious cultural nuclei that sap at our American life, but these
fringes. It is not the Jew who sticks proudly to the faith of his
fathers and boasts of that venerable culture of his who is dangerous to
America, but the Jew who has lost the Jewish fire and become a mere
elementary, grasping animal. It is not the Bohemian who supports the
Bohemian schools in Chicago whose influence is sinister, but the
Bohemian who has made money and has got into ward politics. Just so
surely as we tend to disintegrate these nuclei of nationalistic culture
do we tend to create hordes of men and women without a spiritual
country, cultural outlaws, without taste, without standards but those of
the mob. We sentence them to live on the most rudimentary planes of
American life. The influences at the centre of the nuclei are
centripetal. They make for the intelligence and the social values which
mean an enhancement of life. And just because the foreign- born retains
this expressiveness is he likely to be a better citizen of the American
community. The influences at the fringe, however, are centrifugal,
anarchical. They make for detached fragments of peoples. Those who came
to find liberty achieve only license. They become the flotsam and jetsam
of American life, the downward undertow of our civilization with its
leering cheapness and falseness of taste and spiritual outlook, the
absence of mind and sincere feeling which we see in our slovenly towns,
our vapid moving pictures, our popular novels, and in the vacuous faces
of the crowds on the city street. This is the cultural wreckage of our
time, and it is from the fringes of the Anglo- Saxon as well as the
other stocks that it falls. America has as yet no impelling integrating
force. It makes too easily for this detritus of cultures. In our loose,
free country, no constraining national purpose, no tenacious folk-
tradition and folk- style hold the people to a line.
The war has shown us that not in any magical formula will this
purpose be found. No intense nationalism of the European plan can be
ours. But do we not begin to see a new and more adventurous ideal? Do we
not see how the national colonies in America, deriving power from the
deep cultural heart of Europe and yet living here in mutual toleration,
freed from the age-long tangles of races, creeds, and dynasties, may
work out a federated ideal? America is transplanted Europe, but a Europe
that has not been disintegrated and scattered in the transplanting as
in some Dispersion. Its colonies live here inextricably mingled, yet not
homogeneous. They merge but they do not fuse.
America is a unique sociological fabric, and it bespeaks poverty of
imagination not to be thrilled at the incalculable potentialities of so
novel a union of men. To seek no other goal than the weary old
nationalism,—belligerent, exclusive, inbreeding, the poison of which we
are witnessing now in Europe,—is to make patriotism a hollow sham, and
to declare that, in spite of our boastings, America must ever be a
follower and not a leader of nations.
II
If we come to find this point of view plausible, we shall
have to give up the search for our native 'American' culture. With the
exception of the South and that New England which, like the Red Indian,
seems to be passing into solemn oblivion, there is no distinctively
American culture. It is apparently our lot rather to be a federation of
cultures. This we have been for half a century, and the war has made it
ever more evident that this is what we are destined to remain. This will
not mean, however, that there are not expressions of indigenous genius
that could not have sprung from any other soil. Music, poetry,
philosophy, have been singularly fertile and new. Strangely enough,
American genius has flared forth just in those directions which are
least understanded of the people. If the American note is bigness,
action, the objective as contrasted with the reflective life, where is
the epic expression of this spirit? Our drama and our fiction, the
peculiar fields for the expression of action and objectivity, are
somehow exactly the fields of the spirit which remain poor and mediocre.
American materialism is in some way inhibited from getting into
impressive artistic form its own energy with which it bursts. Nor is it
any better in architecture, the least romantic and subjective of all the
arts. We are inarticulate of the very values which we profess to
idealize. But in the finer forms—music, verse, the essay, philosophy—the
American genius puts forth work equal to any of its contemporaries.
Just in so far as our American genius has expressed the pioneer spirit,
the adventurous, forward- looking drive of a colonial empire, is it
representative of that whole America of the many races and peoples, and
not of any partial or traditional enthusiasm. And only as that pioneer
note is sounded can we really speak of the American culture. As long as
we thought of Americanism in terms of the 'melting- pot,' our American
cultural tradition lay in the past. It was something to which the new
Americans were to be moulded. In the light of our changing ideal of
Americanism, we must perpetrate the paradox that our American cultural
tradition lies in the future. It will be what we all together make out
of this incomparable opportunity of attacking the future with a new key.
Whatever American nationalism turns out to be, it is certain to
become something utterly different from the nationalisms of twentieth-
century Europe. This wave of reactionary enthusiasm to play the orthodox
nationalistic game which is passing over the country is scarcely vital
enough to last. We cannot swagger and thrill to the same national self-
feeling. We must give new edges to our pride. We must be content to
avoid the unnumbered woes that national patriotism has brought in
Europe, and that fiercely heightened pride and self- consciousness.
Alluring as this is, we must allow our imaginations to transcend this
scarcely veiled belligerency. We can be serenely too proud to fight if
our pride embraces the creative forces of civilization which armed
contest nullifies. We can be too proud to fight if our code of honor
transcends that of the schoolboy on the playground surrounded by his
jeering mates. Our honor must be positive and creative, and not the mere
jealous and negative protectiveness against metaphysical violations of
our technical rights. When the doctrine is put forth that in one
American flows the mystic blood of all our country's sacred honor,
freedom, and prosperity, so that an injury to him is to be the signal
for turning our whole nation into that clan- feud of horror and reprisal
which would be war, then we find ourselves back among the musty
schoolmen of the Middle Ages, and not in any pragmatic and realistic
America of the twentieth century.
We should hold our gaze to what America has done, not what medieval
codes of dueling she has failed to observe. We have transplanted
European modernity to our soil, without the spirit that inflames it and
turns all its energy into mutual destruction. Out of these foreign
peoples there has somehow been squeezed the poison. An America,
'hyphenated' to bitterness, is somehow non- explosive. For, even if we
all hark back in sympathy to a European nation, even if the war has set
every one vibrating to some emotional string twanged on the other side
of the Atlantic, the effect has been one of almost dramatic
harmlessness.
What we have really been witnessing, however unappreciatively, in
this country has been a thrilling and bloodless battle of Kulturs. In
that arena of friction which has been the most dramatic—between the
hyphenated German- American and the hyphenated English- American—there
have emerged rivalries of philosophies which show up deep traditional
attitudes, points of view which accurately reflect the gigantic issues
of the war. America has mirrored the spiritual issues. The vicarious
struggle has been played out peacefully here in the mind. We have seen
the stout resistiveness of the old moral interpretation of history on
which Victorian England thrived and made itself great in its own esteem.
The clean and immensely satisfying vision of the war as a contest
between right and wrong; the enthusiastic support of the Allies as the
incarnation of virtue- on- a- rampage; the fierce envisaging of their
selfish national purposes as the ideals of justice, freedom and
democracy—all this has been thrown with intensest force against the
German realistic interpretations in terms of the struggle for power and
the virility of the integrated State. America has been the intellectual
battleground of the nations.
III
The failure of the melting-pot, far from closing the great
American democratic experiment, means that it has only just begun.
Whatever American nationalism turns out to be, we see already that it
will have a color richer and more exciting than our ideal has hitherto
encompassed. In a world which has dreamed of internationalism, we find
that we have all unawares been building up the first international
nation. The voices which have cried for a tight and jealous nationalism
of the European pattern are failing. From that ideal, however valiantly
and disinterestedly it has been set for us, time and tendency have moved
us further and further away. What we have achieved has been rather a
cosmopolitan federation of national colonies, of foreign cultures, from
whom the sting of devastating competition has been removed. America is
already the world-federation in miniature, the continent where for the
first time in history has been achieved that miracle of hope, the
peaceful living side by side, with character substantially preserved, of
the most heterogeneous peoples under the sun. Nowhere else has such
contiguity been anything but the breeder of misery. Here,
notwithstanding our tragic failures of adjustment, the outlines are
already too clear not to give us a new vision and a new orientation of
the American mind in the world.
It is for the American of the younger generation to accept this
cosmopolitanism, and carry it along with selfconscious and fruitful
purpose. In his colleges, he is already getting, with the study of
modern history and politics, the modern literatures, economic geography,
the privilege of a cosmopolitan outlook such as the people of no other
nation of to- day in Europe can possibly secure. If he is still a
colonial, he is no longer the colonial of one partial culture, but of
many. He is a colonial of the world. Colonialism has grown into
cosmopolitanism, and his mother land is no one nation, but all who have
anything life- enhancing to offer to the spirit. That vague sympathy
which the France of ten years ago was feeling for the world—a sympathy
which was drowned in the terrible reality of war—may be the modern
American's, and that in a positive and aggressive sense. If the American
is parochial, it is in sheer wantonness or cowardice. His provincialism
is the measure of his fear of bogies or the defect of his imagination.
Indeed, it is not uncommon for the eager Anglo- Saxon who goes to a
vivid American university to- day to find his true friends not among
his own race but among the acclimatized German or Austrian, the
acclimatized Jew, the acclimatized Scandinavian or Italian. In them he
finds the cosmopolitan note. In these youths, foreign- born or the
children of foreign- born parents, he is likely to find many of his old
inbred morbid problems washed away. These friends are oblivious to the
repressions of that tight little society in which he so provincially
grew up. He has a pleasurable sense of liberation from the stale and
familiar attitudes of those whose ingrowing culture has scarcely created
anything vital for his America of to- day. He breathes a larger air. In
his new enthusiasms for continental literature, for unplumbed Russian
depths, for French clarity of thought, for Teuton philosophies of power,
he feels himself citizen of a larger world. He may be absurdly
superficial, his outward- reaching wonder may ignore all the stiller and
homelier virtues of his Anglo- Saxon home, but he has at least found
the clue to that international mind which will be essential to all men
and women of good- will if they are ever to save this Western world of
ours from suicide. His new friends have gone through a similar
evolution. America has burned most of the baser metal also from them.
Meeting now with this common American background, all of them may yet
retain that distinctiveness of their native cultures and their national
spiritual slants. They are more valuable and interesting to each other
for being different, yet that difference could not be creative were it
not for this new cosmopolitan outlook which America has given them and
which they all equally possess.
A college where such a spirit is possible even to the smallest
degree, has within itself already the seeds of this international
intellectual world of the future. It suggests that the contribution of
America will be an intellectual internationalism which goes far beyond
the mere exchange of scientific ideas and discoveries and the cold
recording of facts. It will be an intellectual sympathy which is not
satisfied until it has got at the heart of the different cultural
expressions, and felt as they feel. It may have immense preferences, but
it will make understanding and not indignation its end. Such a sympathy
will unite and not divide.
Against the thinly disguised panic which calls itself 'patriotism'
and the thinly disguised militarism which calls itself 'preparedness'
the cosmopolitan ideal is set. This does not mean that those who hold it
are for a policy of drift. They, too, long passionately for an
integrated and disciplined America. But they do not want one which is
integrated only for domestic economic exploitation of the workers or for
predatory economic imperialism among the weaker peoples. They do not
want one that is integrated by coercion or militarism, or for the
truculent assertion of a medieval code of honor and of doubtful rights.
They believe that the most effective integration will be one which
coordinates the diverse elements and turns them consciously toward
working out together the place of America in the world- situation. They
demand for integration a genuine integrity, a wholeness and soundness of
enthusiasm and purpose which can only come when no national colony
within our America feels that it is being discriminated against or that
its cultural case is being prejudged. This strength of cooperation, this
feeling that all who are here may have a hand in the destiny of
America, will make for a finer spirit of integration than any narrow
'Americanism' or forced chauvinism.
In this effort we may have to accept some form of that dual
citizenship which meets with so much articulate horror among us. Dual
citizenship we may have to recognize as the rudimentary form of that
international citizenship to which, if our words mean anything, we
aspire. We have assumed unquestioningly that mere participation in the
political life of the United States must cut the new citizen off from
all sympathy with his old allegiance. Anything but a bodily transfer of
devotion from one sovereignty to another has been viewed as a sort of
moral treason against the Republic. We have insisted that the immigrant
whom we welcomed escaping from the very exclusive nationalism of his
European home shall forthwith adopt a nationalism just as exclusive,
just as narrow, and even less legitimate because it is founded on no
warm traditions of his own. Yet a nation like France is said to permit a
formal and legal dual citizenship even at the present time. Though a
citizen of hers may pretend to cast off his allegiance in favor of some
other sovereignty, he is still subject to her laws when he returns. Once
a citizen, always a citizen, no matter how many new citizenships he may
embrace. And such a dual citizenship seems to us sound and right. For
it recognizes that, although the Frenchman may accept the formal
institutional framework of his new country and indeed become intensely
loyal to it, yet his Frenchness he will never lose. What makes up the
fabric of his soul will always be of this Frenchness, so that unless he
becomes utterly degenerate he will always to some degree dwell still in
his native environment.
Indeed, does not the cultivated American who goes to Europe
practice a dual citizenship, which, if not formal, is no less real? The
American who lives abroad may be the least expatriate of men. If he
falls in love with French ways and French thinking and French democracy
and seeks to saturate himself with the new spirit, he is guilty of at
least a dual spiritual citizenship. He may be still American, yet he
feels himself through sympathy also a Frenchman. And he finds that this
expansion involves no shameful conflict within him, no surrender of his
native attitude. He has rather for the first time caught a glimpse of
the cosmopolitan spirit. And after wandering about through many races
and civilizations he may return to America to find them all here living
vividly and crudely, seeking the same adjustment that he made. He sees
the new peoples here with a new vision. They are no longer masses of
aliens, waiting to be 'assimilated,' waiting to be melted down into the
indistinguishable dough of Anglo- Saxonism. They are rather threads of
living and potent cultures, blindly striving to weave themselves into a
novel international nation, the first the world has seen. In an
Austria-Hungary or a Prussia the stronger of these cultures would be
moving almost instinctively to subjugate the weaker. But in America
those wills- to- power are turned in a different direction into learning
how to live together.
Along with dual citizenship we shall have to accept, I think, that
free and mobile passage of the immigrant between America and his native
land again which now arouses so much prejudice among us. We shall have
to accept the immigrant's return for the same reason that we consider
justified our own flitting about the earth. To stigmatize the alien who
works in America for a few years and returns to his own land, only
perhaps to seek American fortune again, is to think in narrow
nationalistic terms. It is to ignore the cosmopolitan significance of
this migration. It is to ignore the fact that the returning immigrant is
often a missionary to an inferior civilization.
This migratory habit has been especially common with the unskilled
laborers who have been pouring into the United States in the last dozen
years from every country in southeastern Europe. Many of them return to
spend their earnings in their own country or to serve their country in
war. But they return with an entirely new critical outlook, and a sense
of the superiority of American organization to the primitive living
around them. This continued passage to and fro has already raised the
material standard of labour in many regions of these backward countries.
For these regions are thus endowed with exactly what they need, the
capital for the exploitation of their natural resources, and the spirit
of enterprise. America is thus educating these laggard peoples from the
very bottom of society up, awaking vast masses to a new- born hope for
the future. In the migratory Greek, therefore, we have not the parasitic
alien, the doubtful American asset, but a symbol of that cosmopolitan
interchange which is coming, in spite of all war and national
exclusiveness.
Only America, by reason of the unique liberty of opportunity and
traditional isolation for which she seems to stand, can lead in this
cosmopolitan enterprise. Only the American—and in this category I
include the migratory alien who has lived with us and caught the pioneer
spirit and a sense of new social vistas—has the chance to become that
citizen of the world. America is coming to be, not a nationality but a
trans- nationality, a weaving back and forth, with the other lands, of
many threads of all sizes and colors. Any movement which attempts to
thwart this weaving, or to dye the fabric any one color, or disentangle
the threads of the strands, is false to this cosmopolitan vision. I do
not mean that we shall necessarily glut ourselves with the raw product
of humanity. It would be folly to absorb the nations faster than we
could weave them. We have no duty either to admit or reject. It is
purely a question of expediency. What concerns us is the fact that the
strands are here. We must have a policy and an ideal for an actual
situation. Our question is, What shall we do with our America? How are
we likely to get the more creative America—by confining our imaginations
to the ideal of the melting- pot, or broadening them to some such
cosmopolitan conception as I have been vaguely sketching?
The war has shown America to be unable, though isolated
geographically and politically from a European world-situation, to
remain aloof and irresponsible. She is a wandering star in a sky
dominated by two colossal constellations of states. Can she not work out
some position of her own, some life of being in, yet not quite of, this
seething and embroiled European world? This is her only hope and
promise. A trans- nationality of all the nations, it is spiritually
impossible for her to pass into the orbit of any one. It will be folly
to hurry herself into a premature and sentimental nationalism, or to
emulate Europe and play fast and loose with the forces that drag into
war. No Americanization will fulfill this vision which does not
recognize the uniqueness of this trans- nationalism of ours. The Anglo-
Saxon attempt to fuse will only create enmity and distrust. The crusade
against 'hyphenates' will only inflame the partial patriotism of
trans-nationals, and cause them to assert their European traditions in
strident and unwholesome ways. But the attempt to weave a wholly novel
international nation out of our chaotic America will liberate and
harmonize the creative power of all these peoples and give them the new
spiritual citizenship, as so many individuals have already been given,
of a world.
Is it a wild hope that the undertow of opposition to metaphysics in
international relations, opposition to militarism, is less a cowardly
provincialism than a groping for this higher cosmopolitan ideal? One can
understand the irritated restlessness with which our proud pro- British
colonists contemplate a heroic conflict across the seas in which they
have no part. It was inevitable that our necessary inaction should
evolve in their minds into the bogey of national shame and dishonor. But
let us be careful about accepting their sensitiveness as final arbiter.
Let us look at our reluctance rather as the first crude beginnings of
assertion on the part of certain strands in our nationality that they
have a right to a voice in the construction of the American ideal. Let
us face realstically the America we have around us. Let us work with the
forces that are at work. Let us make something of this trans- national
spirit instead of outlawing it. Already we are living this cosmopolitan
America. What we need is everywhere a vivid consciousness of the new
ideal. Deliberate headway must be made against the survivals of the
melting pot ideal for the promise of American life.
We cannot Americanize America worthily by sentimentalizing and
moralizing history. When the best schools are expressly renouncing the
questionable duty of teaching patriotism by means of history, it is not
the time to force shibboleth upon the immigrant. This form of
Americanization has been heard because it appealed to the vestiges of
our old sentimentalized and moralized patriotism. This has so far held
the field as the expression of the new American's new devotion. The
inflections of other voices have been drowned. They must be heard. We
must see if the lesson of the war has not been for hundreds of these
later Americans a vivid realization of their trans- nationality, a new
consciousness of what America meant to them as a citizenship in the
world. It is the vague historic idealisms which have provided the fuel
for the European flame. Our American ideal can make no progress until we
do away with this romantic gilding of the past.
All our idealisms must be those of future social goals in which all
can participate, the good life of personality lived in the environment
of the Beloved Community. No mere doubtful triumphs of the past, which
redound to the glory of only one of our transnationalities, can satisfy
us. It must be a future America, on which all can unite, which pulls us
irresistibly toward it, as we understand each other more warmly.
To make real this striving amid dangers and apathies is work for a younger
intelligentsia
of America. Here is an enterprise of integration into which we can all
pour ourselves, of a spiritual welding which should make us, if the
final menace ever came, no weaker, but infinitely strong.
Comment :
I think that Americans tried to assimilate immigrant’s
culture into their own culture. But not every immigrant wants to be
assimilated. The Americans thought that every immigrant who came to their
country will melt into their American culture as melting pot. Because of
Americanization, most of Americans are the descendents of immigrants.
Astri Puji Lestari
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