Americanization; Citizenship; Speeches, addresses, etc.
We cannot afford to continue to use hundreds of thousands of immigrants
merely as industrial assets while they remain social outcasts and
menaces any more than fifty years ago we could afford to keep the black
man merely as an industrial asset and not as a human being. We cannot
afford to build a big industrial plant and herd men and women about
it without care for their welfare. We cannot afford to permit squalid
overcrowding or the kind of living system which makes impossible the
decencies and necessities of life. We cannot afford the low wage rates
and the merely seasonal industries which mean the sacrifice of both
individual and family life and morals to the industrial machinery. We
cannot afford to leave American mines, munitions plants and general
resources in the hands of alien workmen, alien to America and even
likely to be made hostile to America by machinations such as have
recently been provided in the case of the two foreign embassies in
Washington. We cannot afford to run the risk of having in time of war
men working on our railways or working in our munition plants who would
in the name of duty to their own foreign countries bring destruction
to us. Recent events have shown us that incitements to sabotage and
strikes are in the view of at least two of the great foreign powers of
Europe within their definition of neutral practices. What would be done
to us in the name of war if these things are done to us in the name of
neutrality?
Justice Dowling in his speech has described the excellent fourth
degree of your order, of how in it you dwell upon duties rather than
rights, upon the great duties of patriotism and of national spirit.
It is a fine thing to have a society that holds up such a standard of
duty. I ask you to make a special effort to deal with Americanization,
the fusing into one nation, a nation necessarily different from all
other nations, of all who come to our shores. Pay heed to the three
principal essentials: (1) The need of a common language, with a minimum
amount of illiteracy; (2) the need of a common civil standard, similar
ideals, beliefs and customs symbolized by the oath of allegiance to
America; and (3) the need of a high standard of living, of reasonable
equality of opportunity and of social and industrial justice. In every
great crisis in our history, in the Revolution and in the Civil War,
and in the lesser crises, like the Spanish war, all factions and races
have been forgotten in the common spirit of Americanism. Protestant and
Catholic, men of English or of French, of Irish or of German descent
have joined with a single-minded purpose to secure for the country what
only can be achieved by the resultant union of all patriotic citizens.
You of this organization have done a great service by your insistence
that citizens should pay heed first of all to their duties. Hitherto
undue prominence has been given to the question of rights. Your
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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