Chapter VII

My brother, what is Liberty?
What is Democracy?
I feel a quiver run
Through our nation--
What is it we have left undone
In faith and consecration?

Our faith of old--
Has it grown cold?
Is it the search for gold
That made us turn from pledges of the past,
Forgetful of the things that last?
To play?
To chase the shadows in the sun?
To count the trifles won?
My brother,
What is it we have left undone?
What is it we must do?
How can we see things through,
In this New Age?

There is the flesh of body, in which the life of man is rooted;
There is the light of the soul, which makes that life a child of God.
There is the flesh of body, in which the life of a people is rooted;
There is the light of her soul, which makes that life a nation.

What is our nation’s Soul?
America’s Light?
Her entity as a nation among nations?
Her Being, I mean, her Heart, the glow
Of her Spirit whereby she grows;
Her mind whereby she knows
Herself; her Entity
Among the nations, free
Or bound;--this Soul, do you know?

My brother, I tell you no new truth,
Though a deep and wondrous truth.
You may have forgotten--forgotten it!
You, who have been here too long--
My brother, know it again, again!
Or you, newcomer, no one may have told you--
Hear me, then!
It is a faith,--
A faith on which hangs all the law and the singer’s prophecy;
Which cuts down to the life-roots of our Being;
Which lays bare the red-flowing blood,--the sap of life;
And the white-shining Light,--the blossoms of life;
Which makes us stand before our grave, and face to face with God.
Blessed are the men of the past who saw the Light, who had the faith!
It is a faith,--
The faith that through our democracy,
A government and a people sprung from American soil,
Many peoples, peoples sprung from the races of the world--
Through this democracy--
The high-held promises that sleep in man,
Infinite stretches of powers potential,
Social, intellectual, moral,
In embryo traced in lines of beauty,
Can into vital life be quickened,
Strike deep their roots,
Fed in this wondrous soil,
And gather mighty powers of growth,
Unfolding wing on wing of nascent life,
Nearing the stature of ideal selfhood
God has destined they should be,
Through this democracy,
Through a democracy of many peoples,
The great American Experiment,
The new hope-anointed start,
A nation in which the people are the rulers,
A free people of peoples free,
Living in concord one with another,
Striving steadfast for a high humanity,
Reaching out to the ends of the world,
Making an end of Race for the sake of Man,
A humanity, great because it is a race of races,
Great because pledged to advance the statehood of man,
Crowned with the crown of freedom,
Won with eyes and ears, and swords and plows,
And creative brother-will,
And love for noble deeds, and noble song, and noble art,
Calling all men “brothers.”--
That is America’s Soul!
Her Soul in the making.

WE MUST BE TRUE

We must be true, with faith renew
Our solemn vows, forever true!
True as the very prairie grass,
The woods and fields and soil and mass
Of rock, which sun and air have wrought,--
Growing without a thought,
Truly American!

True to historic days, the flow
And national ebb of times ago!
True to the very drops of life,
The battles fought, the stress and strife
Of anguished years to make man free,--
Loving our Liberty,
Truly American!

True to the Lincoln man, the love-chart
Of a great impassioned human heart!
True to the very cry of our Soul
For better days, the far-out goal
Of struggling man,--knowing no race,
Lighted by a brother’s face,
Truly American!

We must be true, with faith renew
Our solemn vows, forever true!
True to the very stars above,
To truth, to freedom, justice, love
For right; yea, unfaltering,--with the brave,
Ready for a freeman’s grave,
Truly American!

FOOTNOTE:

[11] Copyright, 1917, by The Four Seas Company. By permission of the publishers.

ANGELO PATRI

The country which gave Dante and Garibaldi and Mazzini and Madame
Montessori to the world saw the birth, in 1877, of Angelo Patri,
teacher in the public schools of New York City and author of “A
Schoolmaster of the Great City.” This book recounts his endeavors
to realize his educational ideals. That he has been triumphantly
successful does not seem to be entirely to the credit of contemporary
pedagogical methods, and his arraignment of much current educational
theory and practice is as severe as his passionate, Christ-like love
of childhood is touching and beautiful. The World War has convinced
educators rather generally of the need of vitalizing the work of the
schools through contact with life itself, and for this none pleads
more eloquently than he.

The following selections under altered titles are taken from chapters
one, seven and eight.

AN IMMIGRANT AND HIS FATHER

I remember sitting with the family and the neighbors’ families about the fireplace, while father, night after night, told us stories of the Knights of the Crusades or recounted the glories of the heroes of proud Italy.

How he could tell a story! His voice was strong and soft and soothing, and he had just sufficient power of exaggeration to increase the attractiveness of the tale. We could see the soldiers he told us about pass before us in all their struggles and sorrows and triumphs. Back and forth he marched them into Asia Minor, across Sicily, and into the castles of France, Germany and England. We listened eagerly and came back each night ready to be thrilled and inspired again by the spirit of the good and the great.

Then came the journey over the sea, and the family with the neighbors’ families were part of the life of New York. We were Little Italy.

I was eleven before I went to a city school. All the English I knew had been learned in the street. I knew Italian. From the time I was seven I had written letters for the neighbors. Especially the women folk took me off to a corner and asked me to write letters to their friends in Italy. As they told me the story, I wrote it down. I thus learned the beat of plain folks’ hearts.

My uncle from whom I had learned Italian went back to Italy, and I was left without a teacher; so one day I attached myself to a playmate and went to school,--an “American” school. I gave my name and my age, and was told to sit in a long row of benches with some sixty other children. The teacher stood at the blackboard and wrote “March 5, 1887.” We all read it after her, chanting the singsong with the teacher. Each morning we did the same thing; that is, repeated lessons after the teacher. That first day and the second day were alike, and so were the years that followed. “If one yard of goods cost three cents, how much will twenty-five yards cost?” If one yard costs three cents, then twenty-five yards will cost twenty-five times three cents, or seventy-five cents. The explanation could not vary, or it might not be true or logical.

But there was one thing that was impressed more strongly than this routine. I had always been a sickly, thin, pale-faced child. I did not like to sit still. I wanted to play, to talk, to move about. But if I did any of these things, I was kept after school as a punishment. This would not do. I had to get out of the room, and frequently I endured agonies because the teacher would not permit me to leave the room whenever I wanted to. Many times I went home sick and lay abed.

Soon I discovered that the boys who sat quietly, looked straight ahead and folded their arms behind their backs, and even refused to talk to their neighbors, were allowed the special privilege of leaving the room for one minute, not longer. So I sat still, very still, for hours and hours, so that I might have the one minute. Throughout my whole school life this picture remains uppermost. I sat still, repeated words, and then obtained my minute allowance.

For ten years I did this, and because I learned words I was able to go from the first year of school through the last year of college. My illness and the school discipline had helped after all. They had made my school life shorter by several years than it otherwise might have been.

The colony life of the city’s immigrants is an attempt to continue the village traditions of the mother country. In our neighborhood there were hundreds of families that had come from the same part of Italy. On summer nights they gathered in groups on the sidewalks, the stoops, the courtyards, and talked and sang and dreamed. In winter the men and boys built Roman arches out of the snow.

But gradually the families grew in size. The neighborhood became congested. A few families moved away. Ours was one of them. We began to be a part of the new mass instead of the old. The city with its tremendous machinery, its many demands, its constant calling, calling, began to take hold. What had been intimate, quaint, beautiful, ceased to appeal.

I went to school, father went to work, mother looked after the house. When evening came, instead of sitting about the fire, talking and reliving the day, we sat, each in his own corner. One nursed his tired bones, another prepared his lessons for the morrow. The demands of the school devoured me; the work world exhausted my father. The long evenings of close contact with my home people were becoming rare. I was slipping away from my home; home was slipping away from me.

Yet my father knew what he was about. While the fathers of most of the boys about me were putting their money into business or into their houses, mine put his strength, his love, his money, his comforts into making me better than himself. The spirit of the crusaders should live again in his son. He wanted me to become a priest: I wanted to become a doctor.

During all the years that he worked for me, I worked for myself. While his hopes were centred in the family, mine were extending beyond it. I worked late into the nights, living a life of which my father was not a part. This living by myself tended to make me forget, indeed to undervalue, the worth of my people. I was ashamed sometimes because my folk did not look or talk like Americans.

When most depressed by the feeling of living crudely and poorly, I would go out to see my father at work. I would see him high up on a scaffold a hundred feet in the air, and my head would get dizzy and my heart would rise to my throat. Then I would think of him once more as the poet story-teller with the strong, soothing voice and the far-off visioned eye, and would see why on two-dollar-a-day wages he sent me to college.

Proud of his strength, I would strengthen my moral fibre and respond to his dream. Yet not as he dreamed; for when he fell fifty feet down a ladder and was ill for a whole year, I went to work at teaching.

AN IMMIGRANT AND THE CHILDREN

The schools will change for the better when their life is made basically different from what it has been.

They are pointed in the direction of the fundamentals of knowledge, but working with the tools of the classicists. They have developed and developed until we find life on one side,--that is, outside the school,--and learning on the other side,--that is, inside the school. Now the schools must be pointed so that life and the school become one.

To begin with, better school conditions must be provided for the youngest children. The first steps in child teaching must be sound. The primary years of school must be worth while. Unless the basic structure is real, soul satisfying, higher education will be halting and futile. The child is entitled to a fine start in his life’s journey if he is to have a fair chance of carrying his head high and his shoulders straight.

He comes to school a distinct personality. He is joyous, spontaneous, natural, free. But from the first day, instead of watching, encouraging that personality, the school begins to suppress it and keeps up the process year in and year out. By and by we begin to search for the individuality that has been submerged. We make tempting offers to the student in the high school and in the college--we give him better teachers, better equipment, greater freedom, more leisure, smaller classes, direct experiences. We call upon him to stand out, to face the problems of life honestly, squarely,--to be himself. How blind we are! First we kill, and then we weep for that which we have slain.

We do not look upon the children as an important economic factor. Children are a problem to the parent and teacher, but not to the race.

Do you raise pigs? The government is almost tearful in its solicitude for their health and welfare. The Agricultural Bureau sends you scientific data gathered at great pains and expense. But do you raise children? Ah! They are very expensive. And there are so many of them! One teacher to fifty is the best we can do for you. Teachers who are specialists in their profession? Oh, now really! You know we could never afford that. We must pay for high-priced teachers for the high schools and upper grades, but for the little children--all you want is a pleasant personality that is able to teach the rudiments of learning. There’s not much to do in those grades--just the rudiments, you know. There’s no disciplining to do there, the children are so easily suppressed. It’s only in the upper grades we have the trouble!

Stupid and topsy-turvy!

We need the scientist, the child specialist, the artist, in the first year of school. We need few children to a teacher and plenty of space to move about in.

It’s there the teacher should eagerly, anxiously, reverently, watch for the little spark of genius, of soul, of individuality, and so breathe the breath of life upon it that it can never again be crushed or repressed.

We must spend more money on elementary education if the money we now spend on higher education is to bring forth results that are commensurate with our national needs. We spend fifty dollars a year on the education of a child and ten times that amount on the education of a young college man....

Do we really believe in children? Can we say with the Roman mother, “These are my jewels”? How long ago is it that the state legislature passed a bill enabling the canneries to employ children and women twelve hours a day? Fifty children to a teacher, adulterated foods, military discipline, are not beliefs in children. Enslaving mothers is not a belief in children.

Our belief in children, like our belief in many other good things, is mainly a word belief. What we need is a practical belief. We are still at the stage where we separate work and thought, action and theory, practice and ethics. If we would be saved, we must follow the child’s way of life. His way is the direct way. He learns from contact with the forces about him. He feels them, he sees them, he knows what they do to him. He thinks and does and discovers all in one continuous flow of energy.

The child says: “I am of things as they are. I am the fighter for the things that ought to be. I was the beginning of human progress, and I am the progress of the world. I drive the world on. I invent, I achieve, I reform. About me is always the glory of mounting. I have no fear of falling, of slipping down, down. I have no fear of being lost. I am truth. I am reality, and always I question chaos.”

When the child begins to question the wisdom of the group, its religion, its literature, its dress, its tastes, its method of government, its standard of judgment, that moment the group should begin to take heed. It should take the child’s questioning seriously. When the group fails to do this, it gives up its existence, it ceases to grow because it looks back, it worships tradition, it makes history in terms of the past rather than in terms of the future.

Belief in evolution is a belief in the child.

What the race needs is a principle of growth, spiritual growth, that can never be denied. Such a principle it will find in the child, because the spirit of the child is the one factor of the group existence that in itself keeps changing, growing. The child is nature’s newest experiment in her search for a better type, and the race will be strong as it determines that the experiment shall be successful.

We develop national characteristics in accord with our adherence to a common ideal. We must therefore surrender ourselves for the common good, and the common good to which we should surrender is epitomized in the child idea.

I feel that the attitude towards the school and the child is the ultimate attitude by which America is to be judged. Indeed, the distinctive contribution America is to make to the world’s progress is not political, economical, religious, but educational, the child our national strength, the school as the medium through which the adult is to be remade.

What an ideal for the American people!

When my father came to America, he thought of America only as a temporary home. He learned little or no English. As the years went by he would say, “It is enough; my children know English.” Then more years rolled by. One day he came to me and asked me to help him get his citizenship papers. He and I began reading history together. Month after month we worked, laboring, translating, questioning, until the very day of his examination.

That day I hurried home from college to find a smiling, happy father. “Did you get them?” I asked.

“Yes, and the judge wanted to know how I knew the answers so well, and I told him my son who goes to college taught me, and the judge complimented me.”

I have been a part of many movements to Americanize the foreigner, but I see that the child is the only one who can carry the message of democracy if the message is to be carried at all. If the child fails to make the connection between the ideals of the school and the fundamental beliefs of the people, there is none other to do it. The children are the chain that must bind people together.

I have told about parents growing because they sought growth for their children. I saw them grow through the initiative of the school. These were tenement dwellers. Would this thing hold where the parents are well to do, and the streets are clean and music is of the best, and home ideals are of the highest and the social life of the neighborhood is intimate? Is it still necessary for the school to gather the parents about itself? Is it still necessary for the school to go out into the community and get the parents to consciously work as a group for the children’s interest, to consciously shape their philosophy of life in conformity with the dynamic philosophy that childhood represents?

More necessary! If not to save the children, it should be done to save the parents.

No matter who the people are, they need the school as a humanizing force, so that they may feel the common interest, revive their visions, see the fulfillment of their dreams in terms of their children, so that they may be made young once more. Americanize the foreigner, nay, through the child let us fulfill our destiny and Americanize America.

ANZIA YEZIERSKA

Anzia Yezierska was born in a Polish province of Russia in the year
1886, and migrated, when nine years old, to New York City, where
she was sent to work in an East Side sweatshop at a dollar and a
half a week. Her life in America has been a heroic struggle for
self-expression both in a literary and spiritual sense.

Since upon every hand one hears the cry that more should be required
of the immigrants in the way of preparation for citizenship, in
loyalty and in service, it is very fitting that this book of
selections should close with that touching passage of her story,
“How I Found America,” which sets forth the immigrants’ yearning
for fellowship with native Americans and their passionate desire
to serve. Will not here be found the two master keys--fellowship
and service--to the successful accomplishment of the work
of Americanization; in fact, without which all attempts at
Americanization will prove futile?

The writings of the immigrants have hitherto been largely historical
and sociological in character. Miss Yezierska’s work suggests the
unlimited artistic possibilities of the newer elements in our
national life,--gifts on which we should not lay violent hands,
but which we should carefully conserve as a part of the heritage
of America to the future. It is interesting to note that one of
her stories was selected by Edward J. O’Brien as the best piece of
imaginative writing in short form produced during the year 1919.

That part of the story that follows is taken from the issue of _The
Century_ for November, 1920. The same story in longer and somewhat
different form is found in a volume of her collected writings
recently published by Houghton Mifflin under the title, “Hungry
Hearts.”

HOW I FOUND AMERICA

Times changed. The sweat-shop conditions that I had lived through had become a relic of the past. Wages had doubled, tripled, and went up higher and higher, and the working day became shorter and shorter. I began to earn enough to move my family uptown into a sunny, airy flat with electricity and telephone service. I even saved up enough to buy a phonograph and a piano.

My knotted nerves relaxed. At last I had become free from the worry for bread and rent, but I was not happy. A more restless discontent than ever before ate out my heart. Freedom from stomach needs only intensified the needs of my soul.

I ached and clamored for America. Higher wages and shorter hours of work, mere physical comfort, were not yet America. I had dreamed that America was a place where the heart could grow big with living. Though outwardly I had become prosperous, life still forced me into an existence of mere getting and getting.

_Ach!_ how I longed for a friend, a real American friend, some one to whom I could express the thoughts and feelings that choked me! In the Bronx, the uptown ghetto, I felt myself farther away from the spirit of America than ever before. In the East Side the people had yet alive in their eyes the old, old dreams of America, the America that would release the age-old hunger to give; but in the prosperous Bronx good eating and good sleeping replaced the spiritual need for giving. The chase for dollars and diamonds deadened the dreams that had once brought them to America.

More and more the all-consuming need for a friend possessed me. In the street, in the cars, in the subways, I was always seeking, ceaselessly seeking for eyes, a face, the flash of a smile that would be light in my darkness.

I felt sometimes that I was only burning out my heart for a shadow, an echo, a wild dream, but I couldn’t help it. Nothing was real to me but my hope of finding a friend. America was not America to me unless I could find an American that would make America real.

The hunger of my heart drove me to the night-school. Again my dream flamed. Again America beckoned. In the school there would be education, air, life for my cramped-in spirit. I would learn to think, to form the thoughts that surged formless in me. I would find the teacher that would make me articulate.

I joined the literature class. They were reading “The De Coverley Papers.” Filled with insatiate thirst, I drank in every line with the feeling that any moment I would get to the fountain-heart of revelation. Night after night I read with tireless devotion. But of what? The manners and customs of the eighteenth century, of people two hundred years dead.

One evening, after a month’s attendance, when the class had dwindled from fifty to four, and the teacher began scolding us who were present for those who were absent, my bitterness broke.

“Do you know why all the girls are dropping away from the class? It’s because they have too much sense than to waste themselves on ‘The De Coverley Papers.’ Us four girls are four fools. We could learn more in the streets. It’s dirty and wrong, but it’s life. What are ‘The De Coverley Papers?’ Dry dust fit for the ash-can.”

“Perhaps you had better tell the principal your ideas of the standard classics,” she scoffed, white with rage.

“All right,” I snapped, and hurried down to the principal’s office.

I swung open the door.

“I just want to tell you why I’m leaving. I--”

“Won’t you come in?” The principal rose and placed a chair for me near her desk. “Now tell me all.” She leaned forward with an inviting interest.

I looked up, and met the steady gaze of eyes shining with light. In a moment all my anger fled. “The De Coverley Papers” were forgotten. The warm friendliness of her face held me like a familiar dream. I couldn’t speak. It was as if the sky suddenly opened in my heart.

“Do go on,” she said, and gave me a quick nod. “I want to hear.”

The repression of centuries rushed out of my heart. I told her everything--of the mud hut in Sukovoly where I was born, of the Czar’s pogroms, of the constant fear of the Cossack, of Gedalyah Mindel’s letter, of our hopes in coming to America, and my search for an American who would make America real.

“I am so glad you came to me,” she said. And after a pause, “You can help me.”

“Help you?” I cried. It was the first time that an American suggested that I could help her.

“Yes, indeed. I have always wanted to know more of that mysterious, vibrant life--the immigrant. You can help me know my girls. You have so much to give--”

“Give--that’s what I was hungering and thirsting all these years--to give out what’s in me. I was dying in the unused riches of my soul.”

“I know; I know just what you mean,” she said, putting her hand on mine.

My whole being seemed to change in the warmth of her comprehension. “I have a friend,” it sang itself in me. “I have a friend!”

“And you are a born American?” I asked. There was none of that sure, all-right look of the Americans about her.

“Yes, indeed. My mother, like so many mothers,”--and her eyebrows lifted humorously whimsical,--“claims we’re descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers, and that one of our lineal ancestors came over in the _Mayflower_.”

“For all your mother’s pride in the Pilgrim Fathers, you yourself are as plain from the heart as an immigrant.”

“Weren’t the Pilgrim Fathers immigrants two hundred years ago?”

She took from her desk a book and read to me.

Then she opened her arms to me, and breathlessly I felt myself drawn to her. Bonds seemed to burst. A suffusion of light filled my being. Great choirings lifted me in space. I walked out unseeingly.

All the way home the words she read flamed before me: “We go forth all to seek America. And in the seeking we create her. In the quality of our search shall be the nature of the America that we create.”

So all those lonely years of seeking and praying were not in vain. How glad I was that I had not stopped at the husk, a good job, a good living! Through my inarticulate groping and reaching out I had found the soul, the spirit of America.

* * * * *

Transcriber’s Notes:

Footnotes have been moved to the end of each chapter and relabeled consecutively through the document.

Punctuation has been made consistent.

Variations in spelling and hyphenation were retained as they appear in the original publication, except that obvious typographical errors have been corrected.