In the back of our minds we have an image labeled "the immigrant"; and it is never like ourselves. The image has changed from generation to generation, but it has never been accurate, because in each generation it is a political cartoon, an exaggeration of certain features to prove a point. We have to tear up the cartoon; then we can get back to the picture it distorts.

English-Speaking Aliens

The immigrant-cartoon since 1910 has been the South-European: Slavic, Jewish, Italian; usually a woman with a shawl over her head, her husband standing beside her, with slavic cheekbones or a graying beard; and eager children around them. This is not a particularly false picture of several million immigrants; among them some of the most valuable this country has had. But it erases from our mind the bare statistical fact that the largest single language group, nearly one third of all the immigrants to the United States, were English-speaking. For several decades, the bulk of all immigration was from Great Britain and Ireland. If one takes the three principal sources of immigration for every decade between 1820 and 1930, one finds that Germany and Ireland were among the leaders for sixty years; Italy for forty; Russia only thirty; the great Scandinavian movement to the middle west lasted a single decade; but Great Britain was one of the chief sources of immigration for seventy years, and probably was the principal source for thirty years more—from 1790 until 1820—during which time no official figures were kept.

Out of thirty-eight million arrivals in this country, about twelve spoke the dominant tongue, and most of them were aware of the tradition of Anglo-Saxon self-government; some had suffered from British domination, more had enjoyed the fruits of liberty; but all knew what liberty and respect for law meant. Many of these millions fled from poverty; but most were not refugees from religious or political persecution. Many millions came to relatives and friends already established; and began instantly to add to the wealth of the country; many millions were already educated. The cost of their upbringing had been borne abroad; they came here grown, trained, and willing to work. They fell quickly into the American system, without causing friction; they helped to continue the dominance of the national groups which had fought the Revolution and created the new nation.

It is important to remember that they were, none the less, immigrants; they made themselves into Americans and helped to make America; they helped to make us what we are by keeping some of their habits, by abandoning others. For this is essential: the British immigrant, even when he came to a country predominantly Anglo-Saxon, did not remain British and did not make the country Anglo-Saxon. The process of change affected the dominant group as deeply as it affected the minorities. It was a little easier for a Kentish man to become an American than it was for a Serbian; but it was just as hard for the man from Kent to remain a Briton as it was for the Serbian to remain a Serb. Both became Americans. Neither of them tried to remake America in the mold of his old country.

Who Asked Them to Come?

The next image in our minds is a bad one for us to hold because it makes us feel smug and benevolent. It is the image of America, the foster-mother of the world, receiving first the unfortunate and later the scum of the old world. It is true that the oppressed came to America, and that in the forty million arrivals there were criminals as well as saints. The picture is false not only in perspective, but in basic values. For in many generations, at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end of the great inrush of Europeans, the United States actively desired and solicited immigration.

Obviously when people were eager to emigrate, the solicitation fell off; Irish famine and German reaction sent us floods of immigrants who had not been individually urged to come. But their fathers and elder brothers had been invited. The Colonies and the States in their first years wanted settlers and, as noted, wrote their need for new citizens into the Declaration; between two eras of hard times we built the railroads of the country and imported Irish and Chinese to help the Civil War veterans lay the ties and dig the tunnels; in the gilded age and again at the turn of the century, we were enormously expanding and again agents were busy abroad, agents for land companies, agents for shipping, agents for great industries which required unskilled labor.

Moreover, the Congress of the United States refused to place any restrictions upon immigration. The vested interest of labor might demand restrictions; but heavy industry loved the unhappy foreigner (the nearest thing to coolie labor we would tolerate) and made it a fixed policy of the United States not to discourage immigration. The only restriction was a technical one about contract labor. It did not lower the totals.

America Was Fulfilment!

The moment we have corrected the cartoon we can go back to fact without self-righteousness. The fact is that arrival in America was the end toward which whole generations of Europeans aspired. It did not mean instant wealth and high position; but it did mean an end to the only poverty which is degrading—the poverty which is accepted as permanent and inevitable. The shock of reality in the strike-ridden mills around Pittsburgh, on the blizzard-swept plains of the Dakotas, brought dismay to many after the gaudy promises made by steamship agents and labor bosses. But in one thing America never failed its immigrants—the promise and hope of better things for their children. America was not only promises; America was fulfilment.

No one has measured the exact dollar-and-cents value of believing that the next generation will have a chance to live better, in greater comfort and freedom. In America this belief in the future was only a projection of the parallel belief in the present; it was a reaction against the European habit of assuming that the children would, with luck, be able to live where their parents lived, on the same income, in the same way. The elder son was fairly assured of this; war and disease and colonies and luck would have to take care of the others. The less fortunate, the oppressed, could not even hope for this much. At various times the Jew in Russia, the liberal in Germany, the Sicilian sulphur-miner, the landless Irish, and families in a dozen other countries could only expect a worse lot for their children; they had to uproot themselves and if they themselves did not stand transplanting, they were sure their children would take root in the new world.

And this confidence—which was always justified—became as much a part of the atmosphere of America as our inherited parliamentary system, our original town-meetings, our casual belief in civil freedom, our passion for wealth, our habits of movement, and all the other essential qualities which describe and define us and set us apart from all other nations.

The immigrant knew his children would be born Americans; for himself there was a more difficult and in some ways more satisfying fate: he could become an American. It was not a cant phrase; it had absolute specific meaning. The immigrant became in essence one of the people of the country.

As soon as he was admitted, he had the same civil rights as the native; within a few years he could acquire all the basic political rights; and neither the habits of the people nor the laws of the government placed anything in the way of social equality; the immigrant's life was his own to make.This did not mean that the immigrant instantly ceased to be a Slav or Saxon or Latin any more than it meant that he ceased to be freckled or brunette. The immigrant became a part of American life because the life of America was prepared to receive him and could not, for six generations, get along without him.

America Is Various

During the years in which big business solicited immigration and organized labor attacked it, the argument about the immigrant took an unfortunate shift. The question was whether the melting pot was "working", whether immigrants could be Americanized. There were people who worried if an immigrant wore a shawl, when "old Americans" were wearing capes; (the "old Americans" wore shawls when they arrived, forty years earlier); it was "unfortunate" if new arrivals spoke with an "accent" different from the particular American speech developed at the moment. There were others who worried if an immigrant too quickly foreswore the costume or customs of his native land. Employers of unskilled labor liked to prevent superficial Americanization; sometimes immigrants were kept in company villages, deliberately isolated from earlier arrivals and native Americans; wages could be kept low so long as the newcomers remained at their own level of comfort, not at ours. Others felt the danger (foreseen by Franklin and Jefferson) of established groups, solidified by common memories, living outside the circle of common interests. The actual danger to the American system was that it wouldn't work, that immigrants coming in vast numbers would form separate bodies, associated not with America but with their homeland. (This is precisely what happened in Argentina, by the deliberate action of the German government, and it is not an invention of Hitler's. Thomas Beer reports that "in 1892 ... a German imperialist invited the Reichstag to secure the ... dismemberment of the United States by planting colonies of civilized Europeans" within our borders, colonies with their own religious leaders, speaking their own language; German leaders never could accept the American idea of change; in Hitler's mind a mystic "blood" difference makes changing of nationality impossible.)

The first World War proved that the "new immigrants", the masses from South Europe, as well as the Germans, could keep their ancient customs and be good Americans; then observers saw that their worries over "assimilation" were beside the point; because the essence of America's existence was to create a unity in which almost all variety could find a place—not to create a totality brooking no variation, demanding uniformity. In the flush of the young century William James, as typical of America as Edison or Theodore Roosevelt, looking about him, seeing an America made up of many combining into one, made our variety the base of his religious outlook. He had studied "the varieties of religious experience", and he began, experimentally, to think of a universe not necessarily totalitarian. He saw us building a country out of diverse elements and found approval in philosophy. He saw infinite change; "it would have depressed him," said a cynical and admiring friend, "if he had had to confess that any important action was finally settled"; just as it would have depressed America to admit that the important action of creating America had come to an end. James "felt the call of the future"; he believed that the future "could be far better, totally other than the past". He was living in an atmosphere of transformation, seeing men and women becoming "far better, totally other" than they had been. He looked to a better world; he helped by assuring us that we need never have one King, one ruler, one fixed and unalterable fate. He said that there was no proof of the one single Truth. He threw out all the old totalitarians, and cast his vote for a pluralistic universe. We were building it politically every day; without knowing it, James helped to fortify us against the totalitarians who were yet to come.This was, to be sure, not Americanization. It was the far more practical thing: becoming American. Americanization was something celebrated on "days"; it implied something to be done to the foreigners. The truth was that the immigrant needed only one thing, to be allowed to experience America; then slowly, partially, but consistently, he became an American. The immigrant of 1880 did not become an American of the type of 1845; he became an American as Americans were in his time; in every generation the mutual experience of the immigrant, naturalized citizens and native born, created the America of the next generation. And in every generation, the native born and the older immigrants wept because their America and their way of becoming American had been outmoded. The process passed them by; America had to be reborn.

So long as the immigrant thought of "taking out citizen papers" and the native born was annoyed by accents, odd customs, beards and prolific parenthood, the process of becoming American was not observed, and the process of Americanization seemed obvious and relatively unimportant.

The tremendous revolution in human affairs was hidden under social discords and economic pressures. People began to think it was time to slacken the flow of immigrants until we had absorbed what we had. Good land was scarce; foreigners in factions began to join unions; second-generation children grew up to be great tennis players and took scholarships; the pure costless joy of having immigrants do the dirty work was gone. The practical people believed something had to be done.

But the practical people forgot the great practical side—which is also the mystical side—of our immigration. For the first time since the bright days of primitive Christianity, a great thing was made possible to all men: they could become what they wished to become. As Peter said to the Romans, and Paul to the Athenians, that through faith and desire and grace they could become Christians, equal, in the eyes of God, to all other Christians, so the apostles of Freedom spoke to the second son of an English Lord, to the ten sons of a Russian serf, to old and young, ignorant and wise, befriended or alone, and said that their will, their ambition, their work, and their faith could make of them true Americans.

The instant practical consequences of this new element in human history are incalculable. They are like the practical consequences of early Christianity, which can be measured in terms of Empires and explorations and Crusades. The transformation of millions of Europeans into Americans was like the conversion of millions of pagans to Christianity; it was accompanied by an outburst of confidence and energy. The same phenomena occurred in the Renaissance and Reformation, a period of conversion accompanied by a great surge of trade, invention, exploration, wealth, and vast human satisfaction.

This idea of becoming American, as personal as religion, as mystical as conversion, as practical as a contract, was in fact a foundation stone of the growth and prosperity of the United States. It was a practical result of the exact kind of equality which the Declaration invoked; it allowed men to regain their birthright of equality, snatched from them by tyrants. It persuaded them that they could enjoy life—and allowed them to produce and to consume. In that way it was as favorable to prosperity as our land and our climate. And it had other consequences. For, as it stemmed from equality, it went deep under the roots of the European system—and loosened them so that a tremor could shake the system entirely.

Change and Status

For the European system stood against becoming; its objective was to remain, to be still, to stand. Its ancient greatness and the tone of time which made it lovely, both came from this faith in the steady long-abiding changelessness of human institutions. All that it possessed was built to endure for ever; its cathedrals, its prisons, its symbols, its systems—including the symbols and the systems by which it denied freedom to its people. Each national-racial-religious complex of Europe was a triple anchor against change; it prevented men from drifting as the great winds of revolution and reform swept over Europe. Nor were men permitted to change, as they pleased. Nations waged war and won land, but neither the Czars nor the German Emperors thought of the Poles as their own people; the Poles were irrevocably Poles, excluded from the nobler society of Russians, Austrians and Germans. Religious societies made converts, but looked with fear or hatred or suspicion against the very people from whom the converts came—the Jew was irretrievably a Jew, the Catholic a Catholic. In each country one religion was uppermost, the rest tolerated. In each country one folk-group was dominant, the rest tolerated or persecuted. And in each country one class—the same class—ruled, and all other classes served.

By ones or twos, men and women might be accepted into the established church, marry into the dominant race, rise to the governing class; but the exceptions proved nothing. The European believed in his station in life, his civil status, the standing of his family in the financial or social world. The Englishman settling in Timbuctoo remained an Englishman because the Englishman at home remained a middle-class bank clerk or "not a gentleman" or a marquess; and while an alien could become a subject of the King, he never for a moment imagined that he could become an Englishman—any more than a Scot. The English knew that names change; men do not.

Only when they came to America, they did.

They did because the basic American system, the dynamics of becoming American, rejected the racialism of Europe; it rejected aggressive nationalism by building a new nation; it rejected an established religion; and almost in passing it destroyed the class-system.To the familiar European systems of damnation—by original sin, by economic determinism, by pre-natal influence—has been added a new one—damnation by racial inferiority; the Chamberlain-Wagner-Nietzsche-Rosenberg-Hitler myth of the superior race-nation means in practise that whoever is not born German is damned to serve Germany; there is no escape because the inferiority is inherent. This is the European class-system carried to its loftiest point.

We say that this system is inhuman, unscientific, probably suicidal. The poverty-system on which Europe "prospered" for generations and into which we almost fell, was also inhuman, unscientific and probably suicidal; there is no logic in the British aristocratic system coupled with a financial-industrial overlordship and universal suffrage; there is little logic even in our own setup of vast organizations of labor, huge combinations of money, unplumbed technical skill hampered by both capital and labor, and some forty million underfed and half sick human beings in the most productive land in the world. It is not logic we look for in the framework of human society; we look for operations. What does it do? For all its failures, our system works toward human liberty; for all its success, the Nazi system works against human liberty. We tend to give more and more people an opportunity to change and improve; their system is based on the impossibility of change. Our system is a nation built out of many races; theirs is a nation excluding all but one race. Our system has lapses, we do not grant citizenship to certain Orientals nor social equality to Negroes; but we do not write racial inferiority into our laws, we do not teach it in our schools (it may be taught in sectional schools we tolerate, but do not support); and this is important. So long as we accept the ideal of political equality, hope lives for every man. The moment we abandon it, we nazify ourselves—and destroy the foundation of the Republic.Americans All

Turning from the brutal leveling and uniformity of the Nazis, good Americans have begun to wish that more of the folk qualities of our settlers had been preserved. At every point America is the enemy of fasci-feudalism, and this is no exception. Our music, our dancing, the language we speak, the foods we eat, all incorporate elements brought from Europe; but we have not deliberately encouraged the second generation to preserve clothes and cooking any more than we have encouraged the preservation of political habits. There has been a loss in variety and color; and now, while there is still time, efforts are being made to create a general American interest in the separate cultures combined here. It has to be carefully done, so that we do not lose sight of the total American civilization in our enthusiasm for the contributing parts. There is always the chance that descendants of Norwegians, proud and desperate as they consider the plight of their country, will become nationalistic here; and that they will not be interested in the music or the art of Ukrainians in America; and that Americans of Italian descent may be the only ones concerned in adding to the Italian contribution to American life. This is the constant danger of all work concerned with immigrant groups; and the supersensitiveness of all these groups, in a period of intense 100%-ism, tends to defeat the purpose of assaying what each has done to help all the others.

Yet some success is possible. In 1938 I worked with the Office of Education on a series of broadcasts which drew its title from the President's remark to the Daughters of the American Revolution, that we are all the descendants of immigrants. (The President also added "and revolutionaries", but this was not essential in our broadcasts.) Everything I now feel about the focal position of the immigrant in American life is developed from the work done on the Immigrants All series and, especially, from the difficulties encountered, as well as from one special element of success.

I set down some basic principles: that the programs would not glorify one national group after another; that the interrelation of each arriving group to the ones already here would be noted; the vast obligation of every immigrant to those who had prepared the way would be stressed; cooperation between groups would be dramatically rendered if possible; the immigrants' contribution to America would be paralleled by America's contribution to the immigrant; and the making of America, by its natives and its immigrants, would overshadow the special contribution of any single group.

These were principles. In practise, some disappeared, but none was knowingly violated. From time to time, enthusiasts for a given group would complain that another had been more warmly treated; more serious was the indifference of many leaders of national and folk groups to the general problem of the immigrant, to any group outside their own. We were, by that time, in a period of sharpened national sensibilities; but this did not entirely account for an apparently ingrained habit of considering immigrant problems as problems of one's own group, only. Suspicion of other groups went with this neglect of the problem as a whole; the natives born with longer American backgrounds were the ones who showed a clearer grasp of the whole problem; they were not bothered by jealousies and they were interested in America.

On the other side, the series had an almost spectacular success. More than half of the letters after each weekly broadcast came from men and women who were not descendants of the national group presented that week. After the program on the Irish, some 48% of the letters were from Irish immigrants or native-born descendants of the Irish; the other 52% came from children of Serbs and FFV's and Jews and Portuguese, from Sicilians and Germans and Scots, Scandinavians and Englishmen and Greeks. It was so for all of the programs; the defects of the scripts were forgotten, because the people who heard them were so much better Americans than anyone had dared predict. Of a hundred thousand letters, almost all were American, not sectarian in spirit; the bitterness of the cheap fascist movements had not affected even a fringe of the listeners. All in all, we were encouraged; it seemed to us that the immigrant was accepted as the co-maker of America.

Much of our future depends on the exact place we give to the immigrant. It has been taken for granted that immigration is over and that the proportions of racial strains in America today are fixed for ever. It is not likely that vast immigration will head for the United States in the next decade; but the principle of "becoming American" will operate for the quotas and the refugees; and it is now of greater significance than ever because the great fascist countries have laid down the principle of unchangeable nationality. The Nazi government has pretended a right to call German-born American citizens to the colors; and a regular practise of that government is to plant "colonies" as spies.

If we do not re-assert the principle of change of nationality (the legal counterpart to the process of becoming American) we will be lost in the aggressive nationalism of the Nazis, and we will no longer be safe from racialism. Preposterous as it will seem to scholars, degrading as it will be to men of sense, racialism can establish itself in America by the re-assertion of Anglo-Saxonism (with variations).

Are We Anglo-Saxon?

At this point the direct political implications of "becoming American" become evident. Toward the end of this book there are some questions about union with Britain; the point to note here is that so far as Union-now (or any variant thereof) is based emotionally on the Anglo-Saxonism of the United States of America, it is based on a myth and is politically an impossible combination; if we plan union with Britain, let it be based on the actuality of the American status, not on a snobbish desire. We cannot falsify our history, not even in favor of those who did most for our history.

There is a way, however, of imputing Anglo-Saxonism to America, which is by starting with the great truth: the English and the Scots—and the Scots-Irish—founded the first colonies (some time after the Spaniards to be sure, but that is "a detail"); they established here certain basic forms of law and cultivated the appetite for freedom; they were good law-abiding citizens, and accustomed to self-discipline; they were great pioneers in the wilderness; they suffered for religious liberty and more than any other national or racial group, they fought the War of Independence.

Can we say these men created the true, the original America; and everything since then has been a corruption of its 100% goodness and purity? This would allow us to rejoice in Andrew Carnegie, but not in George W. Goethals; in Hearst but not in Pulitzer; in Cyrus McCormick but not in EleuthÈre Dupont; in the Wright Brothers, but not in Boeing and Bellanca; in Edison (partly as he was not all Scot) but not in his associate Berliner; in Bell who invented the telephone but not in Pupin who created long distance. We should have to denounce as un-American the civil service work of Carl Schurz and Bela Schick's test for diphtheria and Goldberger's work on pellagra (which was destroying the pure descendants of the good Americans); we would have to say that America would be better off without Audubon and Agassiz and Thoreau; or Boas and Luther Burbank; or John Philip Sousa and Paul Robeson and Jonas Lie.

When we have denied all these their place in America, we can begin to belittle the contribution of still others to our national life. For the later immigrants had less to give to transportation and basic manufactures and to building the nation. These things were done by the earlier immigrants. The later ones gave their sweat and blood, and presently they and their children were troubling about education, or civil service, or conservation of forests, or the right of free association, or art or music or philanthropy. If our own special fascists lay their hands on our traditions, the burning of books will be only a trifle; for they will tear down the museums and the settlement houses, the kindergartens and the labor temples—and when they are done they will say, with some truth, that they have purged America of its foreign influence. All reform, all culture will be destroyed by the New Klansmen, and they will re-write history to make us believe that wave after wave of corruption came from Europe (especially from Catholic and Greek Orthodox and Jewish Europe) to destroy the simple purity of Anglo-Saxon America.

That is why, now, when we can still assess the truth, when we need the help of every American, we must declare the truth, that there never was a purely Anglo-Saxon United States. Frenchmen and Swedes and Spaniards and Negroes and Walloons and Hollanders and Portuguese and Finns and Germans and German Swiss were here before 1700; Quakers, Catholics, Freethinkers and Jews fought side by side with Huguenots, Episcopalians, Calvinists and Lutherans in the wars with the Indians. In the colony of Georgia, in the year Washington was born, men of six nations had settled: German Lutherans, Italian Protestants, Scots, Swiss, Portuguese, Jews and English. In 1750 four times as many Germans arrived in Pennsylvania as English and Irish together.

The Creative Anglo-Saxon

The greatness of the Anglo-Saxon contribution to America—the gift greater than all their other great gifts—was the conception of a state making over the people who came here, and made over by them. By the end of the Revolution, power and prestige were in the hands of the Anglo-Saxon majority; and in three successive instruments they destroyed the idea of Anglo-Saxon superiority: the Declaration of Independence, the Ordnance of 1787, the Constitution. "Becoming" was not an ideal and it was not the base of Anglo-Saxon society in England; the concept of change and "becoming" was based on actuality; on what was happening all over the colonial dominion. People were becoming American, even before a new nation was born.

All that followed—the vast complexity of creating America, would have been impossible without that first supreme act of creative self-sacrifice. When the statesmen of our Revolutionary period established the principles of statehood and naturalization and citizenship in terms of absolute equality, they knew the risk they ran. In Pennsylvania the official minutes were printed in both English and German; in Maryland the Catholics were dominant; there were still some influential Dutch along the upper Hudson who might secede from New York. On the western boundary, unsettled, uneasy, lay the Spaniards and the French. There was danger of division, everywhere; but the great descendants of the English immigrants did not withdraw. Their principle was equality; since men were born free, they could become equal if artificial barriers were removed. The statesmen of that day declared for America; they knew that men did not, in this country, remain Dutch or Portuguese; but grew into something else. With their own eyes they had seen it happen. They pledged their lives and sacred honor that it would happen again.

So, if ever we re-write history to prove that all the other nations contributed nothing and failed to become Americans, we will also have to write it down that the Anglo-Saxons failed more miserably than the others. For the great idea, the practical dynamics of equality, was theirs; they set it in motion, guarded it, and saw it triumph.

In the next ten years it will be impossible to extemporize an immigration policy for the United States. The world economy will change all around us; the dreadful alternations of plenty and starvation may be adjusted and controlled; we may enter a world order in which we will be responsible for a given number of souls, and some of these may be admitted to our country. By that time we will have learned that nationalist fascism and international communism are powerless here; and no one but professional haters of America will be left to bait the foreigners and persecute the alien.

But above all, by that time we will have had time to reassert the great practical idea behind immigration and naturalization—the idea of men making themselves over—as for a century and a half they have made themselves into Americans.

An Experiment in Evolution

Note: I have used the phrase "becoming American" and defined it as it defined itself; legally, in the customs of the country, it seems to mean becoming a citizen; experimentally "becoming" has happened to us, we have seen it happen, it means that we recognize an essential affinity between an immigrant and Americans, living or dead.

Yet to many people the words may be vague; to others they may seem a particularly dangerous lie. Those who are interested in certain foreign groups, less promptly "Americanized", will protest that for all this "becoming", some are not accepted as American; those who are basically haters of all foreigners will say that the law accepts citizens, but no power on earth can make them Americans.

It is my experience that the phrases created by poets, politicians and people are often the truest words about America; and one of the profound satisfactions of life is to see the wild imagery of the poet or the lush oratory of the politician come true, literally and exactly true, scientifically demonstrated and proved.

In this particular case, absolute proof is still lacking, because we are dealing with human beings, we cannot make controlled experiments. We can observe and compare. Under the inspiration of the eminent anthropologist Dr. Franz Boas, the research has been made; so far as it goes it proves that the children of foreigners do become Americans. Specifically, their gestures, the way they stand and the way they walk, their metabolism and their susceptibility to disease, all tend to become American. In all of these aspects, there is an American norm or standard; and the children of immigrants forsaking the norm or standard of the fatherland, grow to that of America.

The most entertaining of these researches was in the field of gesture. The observers took candid movie shots of groups of Italians and of Jews; they differ from one another and both differ from the American mode (which is a composite, with probably an Anglo-Saxon dominant). The observers found that the extreme gesture of the foreign-born Jew is one in which a speaker gesticulates with one hand while with the other he holds his opponent's arm, to prevent a rival movement; and one case was noted in which the speaker actually gesticulated with the other man's arm. To the American of native stock this is "foreign"; and research proves that the American is right; such gestures are foreign even to the American-born children of the foreigner himself. The typical foreign gesture disappears and the typical American gesture takes its place.

And this is not merely imitation; it is not an "accent" disappearing in a new land. Because metabolism and susceptibility to disease are as certainly altered as gait and posture. The vital physical nature changes in the atmosphere of liberty—as the mind and the spirit change.

The frightened lie of racial doom which has fascinated the German mind (under its meaner guise of racial superiority) was never needed in America. Seeing men become Americans, the fathers of our freedom declared that nothing should prevent them; they were not afraid of any race because they knew that the men of all races would become Americans. Their faith of 1776 begins to be scientifically proved today; a hundred and sixty-six years of creative America proved it in action.

It is on the basis of what Europeans became in America, that we now have to consider our relations with the Europeans who remained in Europe.

CHAPTER VIIToC