History of a literary radical, and other essaysBourne, Randolph Silliman
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History of a literary radical, and other essays
Bourne, Randolph Silliman
American essays -- 20th century
Indeed, does not the cultivated American who goes to Europe practise a
dual citizenship, which, if not formal, is no less real? The American
who lives abroad may be the least expatriate of men. If he falls in
love with French ways and French thinking and French democracy and
seeks to saturate himself with the new spirit, he is guilty of at least
a dual spiritual citizenship. He may be still American, yet he feels
himself through sympathy also a Frenchman. And he finds that this
expansion involves no shameful conflict within him, no surrender of his
native attitude. He has rather for the first time caught a glimpse of
the cosmopolitan spirit. And after wandering about through many races
and civilizations he may return to America to find them all here living
vividly and crudely, seeking the same adjustment that he made. He sees
the new peoples here with a new vision. They are no longer masses of
aliens, waiting to be “assimilated,” waiting to be melted down into
the indistinguishable dough of Anglo-Saxonism. They are rather threads
of living and potent cultures, blindly striving to weave themselves
into a novel international nation, the first the world has seen. In an
Austria-Hungary or a Prussia the stronger of these cultures would be
moving almost instinctively to subjugate the weaker. But in America
those wills-to-power are turned in a different direction into learning
how to live together.
Along with dual citizenship we shall have to accept, I think, that free
and mobile passage of the immigrant between America and his native
land again which now arouses so much prejudice among us. We shall have
to accept the immigrant’s return for the same reason that we consider
justified our own flitting about the earth. To stigmatize the alien
who works in America for a few years and returns to his own land,
only perhaps to seek American fortune again, is to think in narrow
nationalistic terms. It is to ignore the cosmopolitan significance of
this migration. It is to ignore the fact that the returning immigrant
is often a missionary to an inferior civilization.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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