The Jewish American (Detroit, Michigan) (November 27, 1903)
THE MAKING OF AMERICANS.
By Dr. David Blaustein. (Paper read before the New York Conference of Charities.)
The very phrase describing the subject on which I am to speak to you touches the keynote of the American problem of the immigrant. It implies the permanency, it signifies that the countless thousands who are to be made Americans, come not as travelers, not as wayfarers, not to test American civilization and go away; but to find a home, a liberty, a national life broader and deeper than they have ever known, and to become a living part of that civilization, a vital and contributing factor to that national life.
To him who would consider the problem of the making of Americans, there is no saner point of departure than that of asking the immigrant "What does America mean to you?" The traveler who visits Eastern or Southern Europe, whether it be Italy or Roumania, Galicia or Western Russia, will realize and perhaps can then only realize the meaning which that eastern world has given to the word "America." In the land of persecution, he hears of America as the land that is free; in the land of despotism and militarism and police surveillance, he hears of America as the land where the spirit, as well as the body, is free. If he visits a land where the heavy scourge of famine has fallen, he hears of America as the land of plenty and prosperity. Whatever evils, economic, moral, political or even religious, he finds in Eastern Europe, there also he finds the deep-seated faith akin to that of the ancient Greeks, that in the "land beyond the ocean" none of these prevail. What the old, who, with the eyes of faith, see beyond the grave in the hereafter, the young, with eyes still fixed on life, sec in America.
I have dwelt on this phase of the immigrant because I believe that he who would make Americans, must not go down to the barge office with good intentions alone, but must accost the stranger with an understanding of what he expects America to be, that he may interpret to him the real spirit of the land to which he comes and not leave him blindly to grope for the real meaning, so that the mere outward forms, the more strangeness, difference of customs, and so forth, may not shatter the man's illusions, or drive him back into himself to live east of the Bowery, a life not of an American, but of an Oriental. Nor let anyone fancy this impractical idealism, if thousands and thousands who, having come to this shore unwelcomed and unbefriended, have written over the entrance door a proverb unfortunately persisting, not Dante's words, "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here," but of a curse on Columbus for first opening the door to the Western World.
What then is the actual experience of the immigrant? or rather of the American that is to be? For by my very title I have accepted the cure as an American. Let us take the individual case of an immigrant. He comes say from Roumania or Russia. Discontent, unsatisfied ideals, actual persecution, a thousand other circumstances have led him to make that final decision, which separates him — forever perhaps— from his old life. The decision is made; he says farewell to his friends, to his parents whom he may never expect to see again, strong in hope but weak in heart, torn with conflicting emotions, he sets his back forever on all that has meant life for him. Crowded railroad trains, strange faces, strange experiences, actual privation in many cases, breaks perhaps in part the burden of grief ; but the one consoling thought lies in the future. Through the weary nights and crowded steerage, the discomforts of the ocean passage, he almost hibernates to awake one morning when going on the dock, to see at last not New York or Boston, but the "promised land."
The first thought of this pilgrim as lie beholds the buildings and the wharves of the American shore, there is a passionate eagerness to set his foot actually on American soil. The steamer slows down, glides up to its dock, the gang-planks are run out and he beholds passengers rushing down the gangway to be met by eager friends. Here some mysterious discipline suddenly lays hand on him and in the rush of his first bitter disappointment, he learns that he is not yet an American, like the fortunate ones above him, but must wait. [volunteer note: the rest of the column is unreadable] …after is only an addition to the mental confusion in which he finds himself. The steamer carries him to Ellis Island. Once there the blue-coated drivers herd the cattle, and with the crowd, jarred, pounded, banged, he finds himself in a long bare hall, where iron gates and iron bars rouse his suspicion and excite his fear. America to him was first of all freedom and first of all in America he finds himself set round with iron bars. Then comes the physical examination. Perhaps he left the Old World to avoid service in the army. "Am I now to be forced into military life?" is the thought that comes irresistibly to his mind. The examination is past. A long line forms, while brusque, rough-voiced officials whom he speedily recognizes as the blood relations of his old home officials, set the line in motion toward a desk. There sits a scowling, horrid man— another official, of course. By this time America has become nothing but a world of officials. With the air of a Uriadnick, the Old-World police sergeant questions his pedigree, as if he had applied for a passport. Terrified, embarrassed, in halting phrase, blindly returning to that eastern proverb, "It is better never to tell the truth," he makes his answers, trips in his cross-questions ; and at last, driven through a narrow passage, enters another room and sees beyond more iron bars, hundreds waiting for their friends, recognizes perhaps among them those who are waiting to welcome him. This is the most fortunate possible examination. Anywhere along the line he may fail to satisfy the inquiries of the officials and be remanded like a prisoner, to await further examination by the Board of Inquiry, and last of all, unhappily, deportation. But he is not yet beyond the portal. Presently there comes another steamer, more cattle stalls, more crowding, more angry, blustering officials, and at last he is driven on the dock at the Barge Office. At last on American soil. Amazed, undecided, at a loss as to his next step a burly bluecoat lays a sturdy arm upon him, gruffly shouts "Move on!" and projects him through the last gate and in to the America of his dreams, and a vast, vociferous crowd, made up of bunco steerers, lodginghouse fakirs and every other kind of crook, which swallows him up, bewildered and lost, to begin that process I have termed "The Making of an American."
The first question of our immigrant is "Whither?" It was a question that probably never dawned on him until the moment when the crowds swirled around him and he found himself not merely in America, but lost in America. For him there was a certain current and a sure tide, for of whatever nationality in the wide, wide world, a member of none could fail to find fellow-countrymen in America, in New York. Were he an Italian, a ready countryman piloting him to Mulberry street or Little Italy; a Bohemian, East 73d street is his haven; or if a Hebrew, Russian or Roumanian or Galician, he found his port east of the Bowery, not in Chrystie street, East Broadway or Delancey of Manhattan, but in Warsaw, Krakow or Jassy ; found himself not in a new, strange land at first, but in the old, familiar, land his own countrymen had created. But the question "Whither?" was not merely a question of a place of abode ; it was an economic question; for, first of all, the immigrant relates himself to the economic life to live. His first difficulty was a mere financial one. At home, were he a Hebrew, particularly, a great racial persecution weighed on him; but the very weight united all his race and the poorest in the community of the "Pale of the Jewish Settlement" was assured of the help of the greatest. He awakens in America to find that the absence of that persecution has deprived him of the presence of that assistance. Economically he is alone. He must live and prosper or starve and suffer. As a result of himself he is not a member of a community, but an individual in space. This is his first difficulty. With a pushcart, a soda stand, a sweat shop, or what not, he staggers along, bearing the weight of a system he does not understand, but from its very effect upon him, he loathes. He has exchanged economic liberty for personal liberty, but privation and want have taken the place of religious persecution; and he suffers, and suffering, cries out within himself "Why?" And this question brings us to the second difficulty.
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…ophy of submission, the philosophy of sadness, the product of centuries of persecution, and the philosophy of the race and religion, which possess the longest, strongest and most unbroken line of tradition. In Russia the despotic militarism or tyranny has resulted in the fostering of a philosophy of physical weakness, to avoid the rigors of an unloved service. With this philosophy, not conscious or ordered, but inherent in him, the immigrant confronts a new philosophy and a new tradition, for who shall say that America today is not a country of tradition as it is a country of history. A century ago a million immigrants added in one year to the population of this country, as there were last year, would have added one-sixth to the total population of the country and that one-sixth might have contributed no inconsiderable share to the making of America, which was the problem then; but with one-eightieth today, the problem becomes the "Making of Americans." We have seen how the economic conditions past and present clashed, causing suffering to the immigrant. Does the philosophy of submission fall less widely of the mark in the present American age? The philosophy of today in America is not credited at home or abroad to be one of submission. Does the philosophy of sadness find any corresponding philosophy in the teeming, bustling, exuberant buoyance of the American life of today? It may seem a far cry, but it should be remembered that what we are considering now is the self-made American. We are considering the problem of the immigrant making himself an American, through his efforts, before we pass to the consideration of how to make the American. Only a word more on this. The fact that every person who knows the foreign quarters of any great city in this country, and particularly of New York, will perhaps reluctantly but frankly admit is, that here live and die thousands of unmade Americans: immigrants who fail to master either the economic or the philosophic spirit of the country to which they have come and lapse back into living a life of Europe; live and die hating and mocking and scorning the land that was once for them the "land of hope." How then are we to face our problem — "The Making of Americans?"
Having thus sketched in rough that succession of circumstances which results in the failure of the immigrant to become an American it remains to propose that remedy that shall bridge the gulf of centuries, races and nationalities the simple bridge of education in its oldest sense, the "leading out" of the immigrant into America. The plan of which I speak is the plan we have devised and which I have personally applied in dealing with the Jews who come from Eastern Europe. Those who work among other nationalities can, I believe, devise a similar scheme, adapted to their own problem. The first barrier which meets the Jewish immigrant is the barrier of language. In his own country, his people, living in many lands, spoke one language of their own—Yiddish. We must teach them:
1. The language of America; and this teaching the children receive in the public schools, the older people should obtain in evening classes.
2. Many come from lands where they were either deprived from citizenship, or were residents of absolute monarchies, where representative government was unknown. To them must be taught the meaning of the government, which, when they understand, they will realize that they are a constituent part of ; and so we teach them civics, teach them the spirit as well as the law and the history of the American Republic.
3. The Jew of Russia is forced to live in the city; he may not till the field, his life is set within the pale of the city. To meet this we have the Jewish Agricultural and Jewish Industrial Removal Aid Societies, organized to turn the Jew back once more to his ancient pursuit of agriculture, to send him to the smaller towns over the country and to break up the traditional enforced Ghetto.
4. National holidays express national tradition as well as recall national history. It is part of our work in the making of Americans to make the immigrant understand and feel what a victory was won for his country at Concord and Lexington …[volunteer note: the rest of the column is unreadable]
… is by no means one of the minor branches of our work.
6. Similarly, in meeting the philosophy of physical weakness, we strive also to meet the philosophy of sadness. Social life in a tenement in a crowded city falls far short even of the social life of the immigrant at home. To give him that social life we have our halls, our club rooms, our literary classes, our reading rooms, our roof concerts (on summer nights), our entertainments, our receptions, our dances. Community and village life are thus made possible for the tenement dweller.
7. In Europe religion is the fundamental fact of the Jew's existence. Vaguely he hears that in America the state is separated from the church. The younger generation, his children, separated by a gulf from their parents, grasp the phrase and not the fact of religion in American life. We meet this in our system by those classes in which we teach progress to the older and the value, the sincerity and the power of the religious tradition to the younger.
8. In Eastern Europe, especially in Russia, the "ukase" is the wing which shelters the petty official. The immigrant at home believes the lowest official issues the order. Government to him means the official with whom he comes In contact, by necessity a minor one. He learns the value of bribery, the absolute necessity of corruption in all Europe. In America he puts his old-world philosophy to work. The official who enforces the law is to him the man who invents it. The court that applies the statute, the judge who interprets it, is to him the despot who willed it. We teach him whence comes the authority of the court. We advise him in his legal difficulties. We do not litigate for him, but we help him to the proper steps.
9. There is no greater change from Eastern Europe to America than the change in the life of the woman. It might be fairly termed an improper fraction, if one tried to contrast the fractional part woman played in the foreign life and in the American. But American schools and American traditions certainly bring the women from the nonentity to a powerful … from the home in the reaction against the old semi-bondage, tend to create a neglect of those domestic sciences on which the America we are going to make must finally depend. To meet this our system embraces classes in Domestic Art and Science in practical problems of home life.
In all that our tentative system has so far dealt we have considered private activity, not public. There remains one phase wherein the State and not the individual, in my opinion, should take a hand in this making of Americans; for education according to every American tradition is a public not a private affair. Public schools meet the necessities of the younger generation, but that is "born" not "made" Americans. Evening schools as they are now conducted, they seem to me to fall short of the necessity. They should in part, at least, be specially adapted to the needs of the race that attends them, should teach not merely the "three R's," but should develop the latent talents of the nationalities with which they deal, should have something of the complete science that is now employed on kindergarten children shown to those larger children, who are yet young in the meaning and lesson they are learning of "America."
I am presenting no system of perfection, no system of accurately determined methods, but only a few practical ways that in my own experience seem to help in the one problem, for the solution of which we are all working. We are not making Americans for their own sake. We are making Americans for the best good of America, that they, when they are perfectly amalgamated with that America, may themselves become not merely a receptive, but a contributory force, and in its last analysis the "Making of Americans" must inevitably mean "The Making of America,"