The American Story

APOSTROPHE

How now, thou American, frustrated crusader, do you know where you are?

Is it security you want? There is no security at the top of the world.

To thine own self a liberator, to the world an alarming portent, do you know where you are going from here?

In six generations, by your own exertions, you have arrived at this eminence. People before you have spent that length of time in their swaddling cloths. Does it occur to you that by reducing centuries to decades you may have telescoped your destiny?

Be that as it may be, how now do you project yourself? Will you go on crashing the barriers of time and space? And when you can travel so fast that you arrive ahead of your own sound, what will you bring to the world at that speed? Not peace. Peace would be happy to fly no faster than a dove.

At home will you raise the standard of living to the point of boredom? Is life a door that opens by grace of an electronic eye, a key to a model house in the shade of a television aerial, labor-saving gadgets that only technicians can mend, there on the table what every woman should know in The Ladies Home Journal, two cars like sardines in the garage—all of this for so much down and so much per months, and a Social Security number at Washington?

And since you have invented the amazing trick of punching questions on cards and feeding them to a thinking machine that will give you the mathematically perfect answer, perhaps you will give it this question:

Who am I?

You are not the American who inherited the New World. As you changed your environment you were bound to change with it. But your very blood has changed, according to the invocatory words inscribed on the pedestal of the Statue of
Liberty in New York harbor, addressed to Europe, as follows:

Here at our gates shall stand . . .

A mighty woman with a torch . . .

And her name Mother of Exiles.

Cries she with silent lips,

Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.

The author of these lines was Emma Lazarus.

The idea of the Statue of Liberty originated in the mind of a French sculptor named Bartholdi, who designed it. He came to this country in flight from the Paris Commune of 1871. Later he solicited funds in France to pay for it. Many French cities combined to gather popular subscriptions. Americans contributed only the site, the foundation and the cost of perpetual maintenance. President Cleveland presided at the dedication ceremonies in 1886.

This heroic Copper Woman, standing at the gate, holding a torch 300 feet aloft, is the great symbol of the immigration that changed the blood of America, maybe not for worse but certainly for better or worse.

The American Colonies were British. For nearly 100 years American blood was dominantly Anglo-Saxon. The United Kingdom was a greater source of immigration than the whole of continental Europe. Then came a flood of Irish, in flight from poverty and famine. They earned their way with pick and shovel, and were socially saved by their gift for factional politics. Next the Germans in flight from political oppression; they were intelligent and resourceful and made no slums. After them the Scandinavians, who passed through the cities and settled on the land, which made them very desirable. All of this was voluntary immigration from western and northern Europe.

But after the Statue of Liberty was raised the country went immigration mad. Western railroads with land to sell, industries wanting plenty of cheap labor, and steamship companies with steerage space to fill, scoured Europe for emigrants who had nothing to bring but bundles. This was induced immigration and it came principally from eastern and southern Europe—Italians, Portuguese, Greeks, Hungarians, Balkan Slavs, Poles and Russians. The Russian tide was heavily loaded with Jews; and this Jew was not like the one that came with the Germans.

It was one of the great migrations in human history. It rose to a peak of more than a million people a year. During thirty years it amounted to more than one quarter of what the country’s total population was when it began.

Then the gates were slammed, but not until some of the largest Italian and Polish communities in the world were here in this country, nor until the foreign slums of American cities was a national disgrace, nor until American politics had become bedevilled by the existence of racial pressure groups.

Most of them have been physically assimilated; ultimately all of them will be.

It seems hardly arguable in common sense that the American character must have been somehow altered by this racial admixture. But two questions will perhaps be permanently obscured by emotional bias. The controversy between the racialist and the anti-racialist is endless.

The first question is: What was the effect on the average of American intelligence?

Carl C. Brigham, Ph.D., professor of psychology at Princeton, made a scientific analysis of army intelligence tests and wrote a book on the subject, entitled, “A Study of American Intelligence.” In conclusion he said: “Our study of the army tests of foreign born individuals has pointed at every step to the conclusion that the average intelligence of our immigrants is declining. This deterioration in the intellectual level of immigrants has been found to be due to two causes. The migrations of the Alpine and Mediterranean races have increased to such an extent in the last thirty or forty years that this blood now constitutes 70% or 75% of the total immigration. The representatives of the Alpine and Mediterranean races in our immigration are intellectually inferior to the representatives of the Nordic race which formerly made up about 50% of our immigration.”

The other question is: Was Thomas Jefferson right 150 years ago when he wrote against free immigration from Europe on the ground that it was baneful. He said: “In proportion to their numbers they will share with us in the legislation. They will infuse into it their spirit, warp and bias its direction, and render it a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass. . . . Is it not safer to wait with patience for the attainment of population desired or expected? May not our government be more homogeneous, more peaceable, more durable?”

On the other hand, the anti-racialists, who may be called the melting pot people, say, first, that race is a myth, and secondly, that in any case the superiority of one race over another cannot be proved. They say, furthermore, that racial and cultural admixture was something America very much needed to keep its soul from turning inward.

As for the political consequences foreseen by Jefferson, the fact is that since the Copper Woman did her work any candidate for public office, in the cities at least, who could be cartooned in the foreign language press as holding the gate against an immigrant horde took his political life in his hands.

Before the Statue of Liberty an American would have said: “Mine is a Protestant country, racially Nordic, under a Republican form of government that is Constitutional, representative and limited, and lives by a system of free, competitive capitalism.

Fifty years later Protestant had the sound of bigotry, Nordic was racialist and intolerant, limited government was a memory, and free, competitive capitalism had been strangled.

What happened to you, thou American, in these fifty years?

That question also is fit for your thinking machine; and if the science of Cybernetics cannot tell you who you are and why you are who you are and where now you are going, no other science can. But your science can give you more deathly bombs and missles and tell you how in the end to solve all of your problems by blowing the earth out of its orbit.

Wisdom is not a science.