Verhovayak Lapja, 1940. január-június (23. évfolyam, 1-26. szám)
1940-01-25 / 4. szám
m m ' " '■ remain that for some time to come, even forever. It always has been a heterogeneous country, a mixture of strains and religions; which has been, and is, the basis of much of its uniqueness in the world and the source of much of its power. It may be no accident that many of the most dynamic cities and regions in this country have been and are those which include the greatest variety of national and cultural backgrounds. On its sound, positive side, America always has welcomed diversity, variety, differences. The Revolution was fought, in part, because England did not permit free immigration into the Colonies. The Founding Fathers were mostly Anglo- Saxons, but eighteen of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were non-Anglo- Saxons. The springs of this country’s central ideas and ideals have various sources. The Declaration of Independence, one of the greatest pieces ever written, is an Anglo-Saxon document, written by Jefferson in the English language; its contents, however, are not the exclusive patent of any one strain. No one strain has a monopoly on the ideas of liberty, equality, fraternity, democracy... Before the Revolution, the sermons of the anti-British preachers in New England were based on passages dealing with liberty in the Old Testament, a Jewis book ... Government based on the consent of the governed is an all-important concept. The Founding Fathers got it, as it has been shown by historians, from the 13th century Scholastic philosophers, who were Spaniards, Italians and Frenchmen. At its best, Americanism is nobody’s monopoly, but a happy concentration of some of the best aspirations and tendencies of humanity at its best, nearly everywhere at one time or another. As it seems to me, it is the highest body of idealism in the world today. It is, among other things, a movement away from primitive racism, fear and nationalism, and herd instincts and mentality; a movement toward freedom, creativeness, a universal or pan-human culture. In the course of my project, this past year, I have been repeatedly impressed by immigrants telling me or writing to me how they felt when they first glimpsed the Statue of Liberty: how tears filled their eyes, how they wanted to fall on their knees; how they lifted their children to see the goddess. These immigrants were Americans before they landed. They were part of the same movement, the same surge toward freedom, that brought over the Pilgrims. The inscription on the Statue of Liberty remains significant. Americanism welcomes differences, and if we need a motto, I suggest: Let’s make America safe for differences. Let us work for unity within diversity. My guess is that if we try this, much of the diversity to which some of us possibly more or less object will cease to be important or objectionable. Let us begin to accept one another as we are. I don’t mean, of course, that one should like everybody. I mean that one’s decision to like or dislike or be indifferent to a man should be made on the basis of his essential qualities as a person, mot on the basis of the fact that he was born an Albanian or Yankee, or that he came over in steerage or that he can sport a Mayflower blossom, on his family tree We need to be trained, or train ourselves, in the direction of becoming creatively, positively, interested in a man partly because he is different; because, being different, he is apt to have something out-of-the-ordinary to offer to us personally and contribute to the evolving culture and civilization. Emerson said, ”It is the ‘not me’ in my friend that charms me.” Inviting diversity, being interested in it, Will tend to produce unity in a democratic January 25, 1940. ____Verhovayak Lapja_____ country; will tend to make it dynamic; will operate against the concentration-camplike foreign sections and ghettos and restricted residential districts, and will encourage movement and dispersal, at the same time that it will work for harmony and fusion ... Inviting diversity brings out the basic sameness of people, just as the opposite results only in more and sharper differences. It breaks down both the superiorities ad inferiorities, which are equally bad—two ends of the same stick. Inviting diversity builds individual character and thereby helps to endow the country with ability to tackle problems as they come up. We in this country, of late, are not dealing with our problems successfully; in great part, it seems to me, because millions of us are involved in a complexity of group bickerings and prejudices, name-calling, and ignorant racist arguments and attitudes, which are chewing up and burning out characters and personalities.... What to do? ... In New York and elsewhere a group of us—we call ourselves the Common Council for American Unity—are working on plans to project some of these ideas into a long-range, statesmanlike movement, which will enlist education, literature, the movies, radio, and other cultural forces; but that will take time, for it must be done slowly and carefully. Personally, in the project which I mentioned and which is to result in a book, or a series of books, I am trying to work toward an intellectual-emotional synthesis of old and new America; of the Mayflower and the steerage; of the New England wilderness and the socialeconomic jungle of the city slums and the factory system; of the Liberty Bell and the Statue of Liberty. The old American Dream needs to be interlaced with the immigrants’ emotions as they saw the Statue of Liberty. The two must be made into one story. There are many things that I want to do I want to stress what I have tried to bring out in My America, namely, that the U. S. is not anything finished and perfect, but a process in all sorts of ways and respects; that the road ahead is long, and that we’ve got to be patient. There is need of emphasizing the necessity of our curbing our individual and group egoisms and beginning to realize that, whatever our background or religion, we probably are not nearly as perfect as we like to think; of stressing that our present value is not as something finished, but mostly as material for the future. There is need of saying that what is needed is less humiliation and lacerating of one another and more humility on the part of all of us. And, to end the list, there is need of stating Americanism so that it will include all of us, regardless whether our name is Hamilton, Starzinski, Jurgelionis, Brown, Schmidt, Krizmancich, Coolidge or Goldstein; and so that within it we will all be able to achieve a subjective identification with the country and face its problems, not in a mood of mutual fear, indecision, fretting and withdrawal, but with affirmative intelligence, passion, and will. / This—roughly—is my task as a writer just now, and I hope that it soon will become the task of other writers and of educators and historians. But in various ways we can all work - at the problem. It is a job of education, selfeducation, self-control. Perhaps you can help me in my project or study. You may know something I ought to know. I suggest you get a copy of my broadside. It may be had free by writing for it. , Address: Louis Adamic, Milford, New Jersey. There are many things one can do, or avoid doing, in order to help in this problem... If one is a newspaper editor, one can do much by running an occasional series of articles on Page T the new-immigrant groups and their problems, and generally report their activities, as is being done by some of the papers, notably the Cleveland Press. If one is a librarian or bookseller, one can “push” such books as Giants in the Earth by O. E. Rolvaag, My Antonia by Willa Cather, or the recent biography of O. E. Rolvaag by Theodore Jorgensen and Mary Solum, or We Who Built America: The Saga of the Immigrant by Prof. Carl Wittke. And one can urge people to read such books dealing with old America and its values as Van Wyck Brooks’ Flowering of New England, Carl Van Doren’s Benjamin Franklin, Carl Sandburg’s Lincoln, Freeman’s Robert E. Lee, Elizabeth Page’s Tree of Liberty, or The Heritage of America, the Commanger-Nevins anthology of American material from the beginning till now. There are hundreds of good books that should be read by old and new Americans. Schools should begin to exploit the backgrounds of their students and teachers for educational purposes. There should be displays of background materials and symbols. Schools with large numbers of so-called “foreign” youngsters should have period talks and lectures dealing with their backgrounds. Teachers should watch out for manifestations of prejudice among the youngsters and devise ways to deal with them .., One can do, or avoid doing, many things. One can keep an eye on politicians, including those in Washington, who tend to cry “alien” every chance they get in order to accent their “patriotism” or disguise their own intelectual bareness. One can stop avoiding people because they are of another background than oneself and one can even go out of one’s way to meet and mingle with them. There is altogether too much clannishness and apartness in most groups. Some of the groups, too, are afflicted with entirely too much sensitiveness. I know the reasons for this oversensetiveness, but there is need of conscious effort away from it. Whatever one’s background, one should not be ashamed of it, regardless of any prejudice against it. Shame of that sort is damaging to one’s character and inner makeup, and it tends to turn one into a negative person outwardly. One should seek all the good elements out of one’s background and then (without being too sensitive about the elements which are not so good) hang onto them insofar as they are valid in his life here and now, and this not out of any personal or group egoism or pride. Hanging onto them will benefit one personally, help to make one a more effective person and citizen; and, thereby, in numerous indirect, often indiscernible ways probably add something to the sum-total of the evolving culture, to the tone and color of life in general in this New World... In the past there has been entirely too much giving up, too much melting away and shattering of the various cultural values of the new groups. There still is too much of that, to the detriment of individuals and of America. One can be careful with words. Perhaps the worst that can be said for such words and expressions as Hunky, Polack, Kike, Goy, Jap, Chink, Nigger, Greaser, and Wop is that they are ill-mannered... The word race should be used sparingly. There really is no Slavic» Italian, Jewish or Scandinavian race. Sucti differences as exist among people are due, in the main, to different environment, history and experience; when we meet in the same environment and have a common life we tend to become alike... Minority is a bad word, a European word, a symbol of an importanti phase of the tragedy over there. Melting Pot is a poor phrase and concept. It means that
