MOOSEHEJIRT MMGflZlNE
4
Conversations With Six Hundred Thousand
WHAT IS AMERICANISM?
crawl out of the dirty huts of the Laplanders, so as to live in a new ten room house with all modern conveniences with a garage in the back yard.
No race in the United States is numerous or concentrated enough to force the people of a single state in the Union to accept their special imported habits and language. This country cannot be An-glocized or Italianized or Hungarized or Russianized. The most violent race elements in this country would fight the domination of any race as much as they do that of the native Americans. Melting pots are useless, unless they melt the ingredients together.
FULL AMERICANISM
On the other hand the people of America have no right to say, “You may come over here if you like, but we will take no responsibility for you.” If you start a singing school you never let the singers pipe up each with his own tune. Nor ean you say to foreign pupil: “You are not good enough to learn the Star Spangled Banner.” Immigrants can justly claim a right to stick to ther own ways and use only their own language and make a little Poland or a Little Syria in every City, so long as nobody gives them an opportunity to learn something different. In the State of Nebraska .all schools, public or private, must be conducted solely in the national language; but that throws on Ne-braskathe responsibility of providing schools both for children of foreigners and for foreign born adults, in which they have the chance to learn that National language.
It is preposterous to expect the foreign born and their children to be good citizens and intelligent voters, if nobody takes any pains to make them understand what we mean by government of the people. Elections and Legislatures and Commissions are not such a simple matter, even to those who are Americans from eight generations back. How can a poor peasant who has just come off somebody else’s estate in a foreign country make himself a good American by settling down in tenement houses on back streets among people of his own race ?
Above all, Americanism means friendship, common life mutual understanding, give and take. A greht national Order like the Moose is one of the strongest forces for real Americanism, because it teaches people to stand together, to act together, to ignore differences of race or speech or condition in life.
What can be done by a steady effort to bring people together in a genuine American life, is well shown by a little corner of the country, about a section and ahalf of land thirty-five miles from Chicago called MOOSEHEART. For that is a place of social equality of equal advantages, where race and religion andjforeign parentage are simply not considered, where all the citizens, little and large, are received on the same terms of love for their country and enjoyment in “The School That Trains for Life.”
The same thing can be done for children of a larger growth. Take for instance the Spaniard who recently learned his English in one of the evening schools provided by the Americanization drive in Willmington. Delaware. He is a true American because he has worked to make himself American. Listen to the first formal speech.that he ever made in the English language, and see if you are any more American than that recent immigrant.
“Ladies and Gentlemen. Before every think I. ask for you pardon for my incorrec pronounciation and expretion, duty to the short time what I have been here; but I go to do one’s best for to give you my opinion about America.
“I can tell only what when I arrive at this country, I met a more good America that I can dream.
“I have shape about America this opinion.
“America it’s a country, made of gold, where everybody can enjoy a ample, wise and just liverty. “This is at my judgment the reason for which are as Spanish as we leave our Loved country for to come here, because we wish to enjoy this ambition of justice and freedom. And we come here no for the our own well being only, besides also for to give it our little help in the production and the more to try one’s best possible for help it; because though all we love the country where we have born, we love America too. because in this hospitalary country we have a good reception and it is good, and lovely for everyone; for this is America the country of everybody.
“ANDRES BRUN".
That man is our Brother. That is Americanism. Who is for it?
By PROFESSOR ALBERT BUSHNELL HART
Harvard University-Mooseheart Governor
he goes back to the first settlers of Jamestown, though there are not “halidomes” and donjon keeps” and “falcons” enopgh to go round, even in the Old Dominion of Virginia.
Also, the Englishman was not the only American in Colonial times. From the records of the first census of 1790. we can estimate the race elements at the time of the Revolution. We are assured that the Germans of Pennsylvania and the states further south and the Protestant Scotch Irish of the same states formed together something over a sixth of the total white population; while in the last census of 1910, 35 per cent of the total population or about 40 per cent of the total white population, was born outside the limits of the United States. If you are talking of real Americans you must include every person born in this country and claimed as a citizen by this government, wherever their father or mother. Americans all! Likewise Americans, are. ten million negroes, nearly all born in this country of ancestors who were here a hundred years ago.
The great generosity of the United States has opened its doors to all the western world. It is willing to receive this great variety of races and offers itself as the melting pot and Americanizer of the foreign-born and the natives o foreign descent.
i HALF AMERICANISM
A melting pot is usually a hot place, and the ingredients often violently disagree with each other. Everybody who is familiar with furnaces and retorts and crucibles and that sort of thing, knows that one of the products of the melting pot is slag, poor refuse, earthy stuff, that is let out to ge rid of it. If by melting-pot we mean that every element that comes within the United States is to coninue separaely then we are trying to make a solid ingot out of fragments of iron, lead platinum, silver, quartz and sulphur, hammered down into a weak and saggy mass.
There can be.no melting pot, no Americanism— no Americanization,—and in. the end no America, —if every race can bring with it its own customs and politics and way of looking at things, and language, and keep them up just as though it never had left home. Our forefathers never dreamed of letting millions of people come to the United States to remain Italians or Hungarians or Poles or whatever they might previously have been. Nobody can claim a right to bring up his children without their learing the language of the country and understanding the government under which they live.
Wha is the reason that the Empire of Ausria-Hungary has gone to smash? Mainly because it tried to keep people together under one government who were not one in spjrit, who hated each other, could not understand each other’s languages, and were constantly trying to pull each other down. The Germans and Hungarians joined to prevent other national elements from living. We Americans have a national government and spirit, and invite people here, not to continue their old quarrels and difficulties, but to join in our common life and common civilization.
Least of all has the foreign born citizen or alien the right to assault and try to destroy the government which has sheltered him. If any crazy people seek the life-of-death, enjoy cutting each other’s throats and smash all the governments that they have, let them do it at home. America is not big enough to hold such a set of wild things. Nobody has to come to America, nobody is condemned to
STATE OF INDIANA EXECUTIVE DEPARTMENT INDIANAPOLIS
January 3, 1920.
Mr, James J. Davis,
Mooseheart, 111.
My dear Jim:	I appreciate your
sending me your booklet “Truly a Home and More.” Mooseheart is a wonderful institution and when everything else is forgotten, it will be the monument of those who founded it.
Very truly yours,
(Signed) J. P. GOODRICH,
Governor.
WHAT is Americanism ? Why, everbody knows that. It is the way Americans think. What else could it be ? American is we ourselves, the inhabitants of God’s Country, remarkable for -their intelligence, their fondness for ice-cream sodas, and habit of joining Fraternal Organizations. Americanism is what we believe. It is free public schools, popular elections, two-cent newspapers, the Congressional Record, Mary Pickford, flivers, and Victory Loans. Americanism is thp extract of all the Americans.
Ráther round about, so far. We seem to take for granted that we citizens of the United States are the only Americans; and that everything in America is the tip-top of excellence. Let us survey Americanism a little nearer to.
'What Is An American?
When you were last in Paris and received a card for the annual ball of the American diplomatic representative, you presented yourself at a building bearing a brass plate with the inscription “American Embassy”. That is according to a regulation from Washington. The American Minister', the American Consul, likewise the American Dollar, and the American Buyer are known all over the world in the persons of inhabitants of the United States. W’e ignore the fact that the people of twenty nations situated in the new world squirm at our stencilling the glorious adjective “American” for our private use. Brazilians, ,Chilones, Paraguese, Bolivars and Venezularites insist that they were Americans a century before we existed.
That throws us back on Columbus and Americus Vespucius. Every school child knows that about four hundred years ago an obscure geography writer in Alsace said that a certain part of what we call South America ought to be called “America” after Americus the Venetian. -So the name spread to both the great continents, squeezing the name of Columbus back into the present Republic of Colombia, and the capital of Ohio, and “Columbia the Gem of the Ocean.”
When we talk about Americans therefore, we must keep in mind that we mean about 110 millions out of the 185 millions, who are various kinds of Americans. The Canadians are, also. Americans, much the same as we are here. In Toronto you once could find “American Bars” where they played “American pool”.
NATIVE AMERICANS
The only real Simon-pure sure-’nough homemade Americans are usually left out of account by most people who discuss Americanism. In fact, these only pure-blood Americans are called Indians, just because Columbus started out to reach India, and could not let go of the idea that the natives whom he found must ׳ be “Indians”. ־ Hence, the West Indies in the Carribean Sea, balanced against the true East Indies away across the Pacific.
Nobody will deny that the American Indians have some of the fine qualities that we call Americanism. They love independence and roast beef, and out-door air, and are great for councils and discussions, and believe in everybody pulling together for the community when necessary• Yet. it is astonishing how little the imported Americans have borrowed from the domestic grown Americans, except their hunting grounds, “Succotash” and “How!” and “wampum”, and a few other words are all they have given to our language. The Indian even has to take his Summer out of the left-over warm days of the white man’s summer. Nevertheless in Oklahoma, where the Indian voters are thousands in number, they show that they understand American polities; and two Indians have re-j cently been members of the United States Senate.
That leaves the field of Americanism free for the rest of us native born Americans. Certain parts of the country, inhabited by descendants of the English stock, that were in the country before the Revolution, look on themselves as the only real Americans. Seventy years ago a Native American party arose which meant to shut the foreign-born entirely out of public and political life. They forgot that, except the Aborigines, every man, woman or child in the United States and Canada is the descendant of an immigrant. Perhaps, he came over in the Mayflower, though it would take a fleet of Mayflowers to hold all the ancestors of all the people who have organized themselves into the Society of Mayflower Descendants. Perhaps,