Americanization; Civics; Immigrants -- United States; Naturalization -- United States; Noncitizens -- United States
In one army division, at Fort Riley, Kansas, thirty nationalities
were represented by the candidates for citizenship, including
not only the pseudo-Austrians, but Rumania, Serbia, Bulgaria,
Montenegro, Armenia, Syria, Guatemala, Honduras, the Azores, and
most of the rest of the civilized world. At Fort Riley was made the
record of “forty-three citizens in forty minutes.” At Camp Devens,
Massachusetts, more than 2,000 men were admitted to citizenship
and took the oath of allegiance in one operation, lined up on the
parade-ground by nationalities. A New York State court naturalized
soldiers of fifty-six racial varieties on the first day of the
visiting court.
In a session of court held in a Tennessee encampment the court crier
opened the ceremonies with his, “Oyez! Oyez!” and a procession of
dignitaries, military and civil, marched in under the flags for the
ceremonial--a solemn invocation, an address by a venerable judge,
and the crash of “The Star-spangled Banner.” Then the general made a
speech, in which he welcomed each of those who a little while before
had been “strangers and foreigners,” and dubbed him “one of _our_
men.”
“Fellow citizens, comrades!” he struck home with booming voice in his
peroration, “we will lash ourselves together with hoops of steel, and
go forth to avenge the outrages that have been committed. There is no
power on earth that can keep us from our purpose!”
Some soldier started the song, “Keep the Home Fires Burning,” and
the aliens of a little while before, many of them hardly knowing
the English word, joined in, with lusty emphasis upon and new
significance in the refrain,
“_Till the boys come home!_”
Down in Alabama, a government official at a similar session
apostrophized Liberty in strident Polish, followed by a second
lieutenant in similar vein, but in Italian; and even those of other
tongues, including English, who could not understand the words, knew
well enough or felt in their hearts the drift of it.
As has been said, some got across without naturalization, and one
aftermath of that was an extraordinary scene in the Walter Reid
Hospital at Washington. The opportunity returned to the wounded
there, in dramatic guise. An orderly walked through the wards
summoning all men who desired to become citizens to gather at once in
the library, to be taken before the judge.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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