Chapter XIII: Foreign Outposts in the United States

Four distinct national elements in the United States showed, in lesser or greater part, disloyalty and pro-Germanism during the War. These were the Germans, the Jewish Bolsheviki, the Sinn-Feiners, and the French-Canadians. Of course these four were no different from most other foreign-speaking elements. Only their standpoints and loyalties were clearly brought out by the war--that was all. Italian or Portuguese, Greek or Slav, in case their home country had been lined up against the United States, would have acted in just the same way.

Here we must touch upon a fact which is pretty widely known or taken for granted. There is a fundamental difference between this later immigration and that of the middle portion of the nineteenth century. The Germans, Hungarians, and Italians of 1848-70, for instance, came to America for the same reason as most of the original British and Irish. They were seeking freedom and democracy. Their purposes were idealistic. They sought in the new country not only economic opportunity but political liberty which were denied them in the old. They were Americans at heart before they left their old home.

The new immigration is totally different. This later swarm has come mostly to get jobs and money. Among them, no doubt, there are a few who are gifted with qualities of mind and character which make this description inapplicable. I am referring to the many, not the few. In Southern and Eastern Europe they form the lowest grade of the working class and include a large percentage of beggars and peddlers, of thieves and criminals. The average immigrant of this sort has been accustomed to a condition of poverty unknown to, and almost unimaginable to, the average American. His physical standards of living are such as to make his competition with the original American worker unfair and deadly. Great masses of them have come without the slightest intention of remaining with us and adopting American standards. Herded together under the most unsanitary conditions, hoarding up their wages with a greed incomprehensible to an American, crowds of them rush back to the country of their origin as soon as their savings are sufficient for their purposes. Meanwhile they are replaced by others until the standards of living of the American-born wage-earners are hopelessly undermined. Each immigrant who comes to us under these conditions prevents the founding of an American home and the birth of American children. Let us hasten to add that their coming and going can not in any way be held as an accusation against themselves. Responsibility lies entirely with us. Employers who bring them over, or prevent their rejection, under the conditions stated, are guilty of a monstrous crime against civilization. This crime is comparable to only one other in our history--the African slave-trade of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Meanwhile every conception and institution upon which our social and political life is established is torn from its mooring and broken up by the force of the inpouring waves. In Southern and Eastern Europe and in the Near East, these masses are, or have been, until very recently, ruled as they were in the Middle Ages. Rebellion against tyrants to them means acceptance of Anarchism or Bolshevism, or at least German state Socialism. East of the Rhine and south of the Alps they are capable at present only of running wildly about from one tyranny to another, from one stupid blunder to another and back again. If this population in Europe is proving itself to be totally incompetent to govern itself, how can we expect it to take an intelligent and useful part in all the complexities of democracy here? If a million Hungarians, for instance, have failed at every point of the political compass in Hungary, how, in Heaven's name, can we expect them to succeed in New York or Chicago? That mass of Hungarians, like Italians and Germans, like Jews and Greeks, induces the vilest sort of boss rule. They are largely kept away from our public schools by clerical opposition to our school system. A slave population in Europe, they become a slave population here. Politically they are the willing tools of every hidden and dangerous force at work in our public life.

It is no part of my purpose to arouse, in the slightest degree, hatred of these people. Many of them are kind, innocent, simple, unknowing creatures. As strangers in a strange land, they deserve every degree of consideration, every means of help at our hands, which it is in our power to give to them. Their natural inclination, as well as their great numbers, are responsible for that separation from us which the foreign quarter implies. The continued use of foreign languages, and the clinging to foreign customs, are things which should never have been tolerated on our soil. By herding together they bring up their children in a foreign atmosphere, thus perpetuating and increasing the weaknesses and dangers which they have brought into our national life. I used the word "increasing" advisedly. In Europe each unit of this backward and inept mass of poor is merged in a nation which understands him and where he, in turn, somewhat understands his surroundings. But segregated by language and nationality here, they are broken away from their old moorings without binding themselves to the new. In the old world they are led politically, sometimes, by men of education and ideals. With us they fall easy prey to any fool and fakir and dishonest representative of the political machine or vicious interest which may seek to prey upon them and mislead them.

A few particular facts concerning propagandistic activities among our immigrant population may be illuminating if set down together. During the war the pro-Germans organized and conducted a most elaborate and expensive propaganda among our Ukrainian immigrants. This was done in order to weaken Russia at home, both before and after the revolution.

Sinn-Fein Irish, because of their inveterate hatred of the British, were in many cases used to spread pro-German propaganda. This was effectual both before and after we went into the war.

A very large percentage of the Russian Jews in New York City and elsewhere were, at the beginning of the war, pro-German because they were anti-Russian. After we entered the war they were bitterly anti-American because they were pro-Bolshevist. No possible turn of events could make them take a pro-American position upon any issue under the sun. This is the element, by the way, which used funds from Russia to carry on its pro-Bolshevistic propaganda among our Negroes. In certain places, including New York City, it urged the Negroes to arm themselves and fight the whites.

The French-Canadian immigrants among us number, with their children, nearly half a million. During the war they were, strange as it may seem, anti-French. The French-Canadian population is completely dominated, politically, socially and intellectually, by their clergy. These clericals still hate France and the French Government because the French Revolution overthrew the power of the Roman Church in France. They still belong to the ancient regime. So they naturally took the side of the ancient regime, the German side. Among us, they were largely passive. In Canada they actively opposed every war activity of their government from start to finish of the war.

Of the Asiatics there are two main elements--the Japanese and the East Indians. Of the East Indians there are not many, but their number is steadily increasing. They are being widely used to stir up an Indian revolution against the British Empire. Whether this is or is not justified we are not discussing here. The point is that this foreign element is using America as a vantage-point from which to make war upon another country.

Finally, we come to the Japanese. Here we find the climax of this whole matter. The religion of the Japanese immigrants is, primarily, Mikado-worship. Sums of money to build the temples for this delectable form of religious expression are furnished largely by the Japanese government. When we ponder these facts we may well ask whether we as a nation do not ourselves require a guardian. We resemble a five-year old child with a purse full of money, sitting in a poker game with greedy and astute gamblers. To carry our sentimentalism so far, to overwork the theory of the brotherhood of man to such an extent as this, is to court total disaster. We as a nation are asleep because selfish, corrupt and designing interests among us have drugged us out of our senses. These great interests want cheap labor. They are aided in their designs by a crowd of well-meaning but ignorant sentimentalists, most of whom do not dream that they are helping to destroy our American nation in order to experience an emotional satisfaction. The employers get their cheap labor, and the sentimentalists their self-satisfaction. We, the foolish majority, are losing our freedom and our country. If the facts do not cry us into action, why multiply words? All America is hoping, praying and preparing for peace with Japan. But to further permit even the smallest amount of Japanese immigration will surely tend to war. In the event of war any American in Japan will undoubtedly take the side of his own country. We shall fully expect him to do so. For the same reason the hundred and fifty thousand Japanese in our own country will prove to be a hundred and fifty thousand skillful and resolute enemies. Making an American out of a Japanese under the conditions above described is as impossible as making a sheep out of a goat, or a dog out of a cat. As to whether or not we are superior to the Japanese, is not the matter at issue here. The important fact right here is that we differ greatly from each other in the basic things of life, and these differences are largely inherited qualities. Furthermore, these differences must surely make Japanese amalgamation with our people wholly undesirable. Such a mixture of bloods runs counter to a fundamental principle of biology which all high-school children learn as a matter of course. The offspring of such a blending of widely different stocks are likely to be unstable in mind. In general they can not qualify as to either the physical, mental or moral standards of either race. In amalgamation there is likely to be a loss from the standards of either side.

The Japanese child in the United States is sent to a school owned and controlled by the Japanese Government. There he is taught the language, ideals and duty of an abject subject of the Mikado. Finally, the Japanese birth rate in California is sixty-nine per thousand annually, the white birth rate nineteen per thousand.

"But the pure descendants of the Japanese immigrants may surely change and become real Americans," I hear somebody saying. Meanwhile, we have just been informed that the son of German parents in Cincinnati, who had accepted a Captain-Surgeon's commission in our army and gone to France had not been perfectly Americanized. The fellow was hanged for inoculating our soldiers with disease germs instead of typhoid serum. This creature was born and reared not in the United States, but in the German section of Cincinnati. With this in mind we expect to Americanize the Japanese, the very breath of whose intense religious emotion is the sacred worship of their absolute and august ruler, the Mikado!

Be it a million Russians or a million Japanese, a million Italians or a million French-Canadians--either their importation or their birth upon our soil prevents by the stifling force of economic competition the birth of a million Americans. In the name of Almighty God and our country, what has become of our brains? These facts are enough to make any of us not totally bereft of his senses to go into the highways and the byways crying for the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, or if some man has a better plan for safeguarding the nation conjuring him in God's name to proclaim it.