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On the Trail of The Immigrant

<h2>XXII RELIGION AND POLITICS</h2> ON a recent trip through Germany there fell into my hands a little book about America which bears the modest title, “Americana.” It was written by Professor Karl Lamprecht of the University of Leipzig, and is a note-book in which he records his impressions about us. Being a Professor of History and especially conversant with that part of it which deals with our country, his conclusions have large value. That which impressed him most about our life was the prevalence of the religious atmosphere and the genuineness of our piety. The sentence which seemed to me to stand out above every other which he has written is this: “My conviction that this people is destined to great things bases itself above all else upon the fact, that it is capable of religious impressions.” I have felt this by virtue of a sort of vague faith, and have always regarded the religious problem which the immigrant presents, as the crucial one. We shall soon be of one blood—sooner yet of one speech; but how soon we shall have one faith, and common religious ideals, or how long we shall be able to preserve those religious ideals which are the guarantee of our greatness, as well as of our permanence as a republic, are very large and very serious questions. It is not easy to deny that certain phases of our religious life in America are to a great degree unknown in Southern and Eastern Europe, and cannot be readily understood by the average immigrant:—the entire separation of Church and State, yet the complete union of religion and national life; the large place of the individual as a religious functionary, and yet the absolute equality of priest and people; the prevalence of forms and the permanence of the ethical and spiritual. The immigrant comes to us, largely from countries in which the Church and the State, the cross and the sword, are one. In fact to the large majority of those who come, nationality or race, and the Church, are one and the same. The Russian and the Southern Slav who are not pravo Slavs, adherents of the Greek Church, are regarded very much in the light of traitors to their nations. The Pole is a Catholic by national instinct; Poland and Roman Catholicism are to him one and the same; while the Jew is a Jew by race and faith, regarding as a profligate, him who betrays his people by becoming a Christian. Roughly speaking, nearly eighty per cent. of our present immigration is made up of Roman Catholics, Greek Catholics, Greek Orthodox and Jews. More or less, usually more rather than less, they bring with them and foster these ideas. This is undoubtedly true of nearly all the Slavs whom the Church divides racially and who are enemies; remaining so a long time on this side of the Atlantic. The Church, cognizant of this fact, fosters it in no small degree, because it can hold its children more loyally to itself by giving the national idea a large place. Polish, Bohemian and Slovak church societies of a semi-military character exist in large numbers, and many of their members carry arms. Although in itself this may be a harmless way of keeping men loyal to the Church, it does seem to clash with one of our religious ideals, which is fundamental in maintaining religious liberty. I am judging only as an outsider and am telling only what seems to me to be the case; but I am speaking also for a large number of Catholic priests who see in this no small menace and who have tacitly admitted it. The sooner the Catholic Church can get rid of Polish and Italian priests who have been trained in Europe, to whom religion is a sort of politics,—and a certain kind of politics is religion,—the better for the Church and of course the better for the State. The immigrants free themselves from the autocracy of the Church and of the priest more quickly than from the national idea, and they easily breathe in the liberating atmosphere and sometimes manifest it in a very disagreeable way. The close supervision which the priest exercises over his parishioners, the respect they pay to him, the awe in which he is held, are helpful rather than detrimental phases of their religious life, where the priest is a true priest. There are, however, too many who are not, and I am sure that the authorities of the Church concerned are perhaps more anxious about this than are we, who are simply looking over the fence at our neighbours’ affairs. I am more concerned by the fact that in nearly all the immigrants with whom I have dealt, forms and a certain blind faith, obscure the ethical demands of Christianity. This is certainly true of the adherents of the Greek Orthodox Church and not entirely untrue of those belonging to other Churches. I am conscious of the fact that just here prejudice can blind one completely; and I want to keep myself free from that charge. My religious outlook cannot be called narrow, when one takes into consideration that Roman Catholic priests were both my teachers and my companions, that I have lived in a Russian monastery, that I know the Slav, the Italian and the Jew better perhaps than I know the American, and that to know them as sympathetically as I do, one must know them without prejudice. Probably on the other hand I shall not escape the charge of timidity when I say that in the countries in Europe from which our present immigration flows the Church has fostered the form of religion and has too often neglected its ethical demands; or perhaps that it has laid greater emphasis upon the poetry of religion than upon its stern prose. Into the Easter celebration the Greek Orthodox churches have woven all the charm which the religious mind can invent. I have seen almost the third heaven opened on Easter eve in Russia and also in Poland. Yet hardly had the last triumphant cry, “Christ is risen” died upon the gray morning, when the same mob which shouted, “Christ is risen,” also cried, “Kill the Jews.” Kisheneff, Bialistok, Sedlice and the scenes of small and large pogroms in Poland, Austria and Hungary, which have remained unrecorded, are sufficient proof of the fact that many of the Slavic people have no idea of the teachings of Jesus; and that religion to them is a matter of form necessary to observe, a sort of charm against evil spirits and bad luck. In this respect, however, the churches concerned are not sinners above others; and the Protestant churches in America have also been more successful with the millinery of religion than with its essence. It would be wrong to say that the people who now come to us will dull our religious faculties, and make them less impressionable. Nothing could be further from the truth; for essentially they are a religious people and even now there are taking place among them great religious developments. I believe that in the crude state in which the present immigrant comes, he is ready for the best the Church can give to him. No one church is equal to the task, and antagonistic as they may be towards one another, I believe the nation needs both the Protestant and Catholic types; that the field now is so large and the problem so difficult, that they both need to put forth their best efforts. Each needs to prove Lessing’s story of the “Three Rings”; each needs to prove that it has the true ring, the true message of redemption, and it can prove that best by living its best, and by noblest endeavour for these children of men who have brought to our doors the problem of Christianizing the whole world. The breadth of vision and the depth of conviction which animate a certain section of America in this respect, are best illustrated by these ringing words from a recent address by President Tucker of Dartmouth College: “If God were not pouring into New England out of the riches of other countries, New England would be empty. While the latest foreigner may not compare favourably with the native stock, what of the second and third generations of foreigners? They are forging to the front, partly because of their virility and ambition, and partly through the sacrifice of the homes to educate their children. The rising scale of foreign population is on a better level than the falling scale of the native population. If the old New England stock is not willing to sacrifice as it used to, and if the New England boy is not as ambitious as his grandfather, I thank God that he is sending us those who are willing to sacrifice and anxious to rise; and that he is giving this challenge to the old stock: Rise up and show yourselves! If we do not see and feel it, it is to our shame. We are not the elect of God unless we prove our election, and if He can do better for the world through some other stock and religion than through the native stock and Protestant religion, let Him work in His own way.” I need not say here how large a place the public school and the settlement both have (in spite of the fact that they are often called godless institutions) in making religious impressions upon the immigrant. The glimpse of a higher world, the world of the spirit, has been given to many eyes almost blind to the divine light, by modest men and women who have worn neither cassock nor crosses, and who were ordained to their holy task only as they felt the touch of needy children resting upon their hearts. I recall a little, sharp-eyed Jewish lad whom lured from his news stand by recklessly buying his whole stock of evening papers. He had lived in Boston five years and was Bostonese, to the dropping of his Rs, and the picking them up again, to put where they did not belong. He was a product of the public school, not yet finished, but in the making; and over him hovered the benediction of some noble teacher, whose glory he reflected. “Teacher? O yes! teacher was even more than parents, almost like God. Teacher knew more than the stupid rabbi, who tried to drill into him the Hebrew alphabet.” The boy had neither church nor synagogue, nor priest nor preacher nor rabbi; he had but two things to cling to, the school and the settlement. Piteous was his scorn of the faith of his fathers, the accusation and condemnation of everything Jewish, the contempt with which he called his people “Sheney”; the horror of fast and feast days, and his delight in the anticipation of a Jewish Sabbath meal. He will become what Max Nordau calls a “stomach Jew,” in opposition to the “soul Jews,” who alas! are growing fewer and fewer, on both sides of the sea. This boy, grown up, or growing up in Boston, knew nothing of us, of our type of Christianity, or of Christianity at all; except the fact that the world is divided between Christians and Jews. The settlement has done something for him; it has given his unskilled fingers the taste for handicraft, and he told me with honest pride of the things he had made with “his own hands.” It has also given him a knowledge of human kindness, although he does not yet realize that the men and women in the settlements are working because of the love they have for God’s children. I have found Jews everywhere who were Christian in spirit; and the distance between synagogue and church is as great as it is, only because of prejudices, which the church has not yet allayed and which unconsciously it is increasing. The Jew is suspicious of missions and missionaries and has good reason to be, but he responds quickly to the notes of true religion whenever they strike his heart; even as he responds quickly to the best things in our national life. I recall walking through Boston in the streets stretching South and far North where Russia and Polish Jews live. They are keepers of shops of all varieties, busy scavengers of second-hand articles; busier than we know, with thread and needle in clothing and sweat shops. They are dealers in junk, the refuse and wreckage of our industrial establishments; creators of new avenues of trade and of some new industries. Some of these Jews know that they live in Boston and act like it. I had alighted at the North Station and was walking with a lady whose luggage I had offered to carry to the car. She had a baby on one arm and a large satchel in the other hand, so in order not to knock against her with the heavy valise which I carried, I walked on the inside. Suddenly from his shop door, a Russian Jew, in English strongly tainted by Yiddish, called out: “You greenhorn, don’t you know that in Boston men don’t walk on the insides of the ladies?” Promptly, as though impelled by a command, I shifted my load, and “walked on the outside of the lady.” That Jew had been responsive to Boston’s spirit of decorum and would be equally responsive to the best in its religious life if it were presented to him. He likes least to be singled out as a Jew and to be dealt with as such, either by churches or missions. He is most easily approached from the standpoint of the average man, and not from the peculiar racial and religious standpoint of the Jew. <ANTIMG src="images/ill_pg_330_sml.jpg" width-obs="348" height-obs="500" alt="ON THE DAY OF ATONEMENT. The distance between synagogue and church is really not so great as some suppose. Many a Jew is Christian in spirit if not in creed." title="ON THE DAY OF ATONEMENT" /> ON THE DAY OF ATONEMENT. The distance between synagogue and church is really not so great as some suppose. Many a Jew is Christian in spirit if not in creed. Side by side with the religious problem is growing to menacing proportions the problem of politics. A nation like our own, ideally founded upon universal suffrage, is putting its destinies in the hands of men untrained in citizenship; the very name citizen being so new to them that they cannot easily grasp its meaning. The tutelage of Tammany Hall and of its kind all over the United States has been a bad preparation for so momentous a task. It does not diminish the greatness of the problem in the least when I say that the foreigner is usually the innocent tool, in a corrupting process which has been going on for many years, and to the existence of which the nation is just awaking. I have been offered citizenship papers in the city of New York for ten dollars; and have seen them peddled by Americans who had back of them the protection of political bosses of no less genuine American ancestry. I have seen whole groups of Polanders marched to the ballot-box, when they were so drunk that they had to be kept erect by a stalwart American patriot who swore that they had the right to vote, when they had scarcely been a year in this country. I have seen men who are respected in their communities, buy votes wherever they could get them, corrupting a mass of men who were as ignorant of the process of voting and as unfitted for it, as little babes; and these very men I have heard loudly proclaiming the corrupting influence of the foreign element. With all that, the foreigner is rising in the scale of citizenship and is not so bad as he has the right to be, considering the example set him. Delaware is not controlled by foreigners, yet the peaches in its political basket are rotten both at the top and at the bottom. Connecticut, the “Constitution State” as it loves to call itself, is still dominantly American, and yet there are so many “wooden nutmegs” in the spice box of its magnificent State House that its best citizens are hanging their heads from shame. New Hampshire and Vermont are not model States, in spite of the fact that the foreign vote is almost “nil”; while the city of Philadelphia cannot claim that it is better governed than the city of New York, where the foreign population predominates and dominates. The immigrant, it is true, will sell his vote; but the American buys it, and sells it too, and he is the greater traitor; because he is betraying his native country. Again, this does not assume that the immigrant is not a political problem; he is, but only because we are, and in this he rises and falls with us, and sometimes rises above us. All that which we call patriotism he quickly imbibes. He loves the Fourth of July, and he knows its meaning and its value often better than the native born. I have no fear on that score; and should America, God forbid, engage in war, you would find at the very front the Jew, the Slav, and the Italian with the Yankee, fighting the same battle; yes, and fighting his own people should they unjustly attack us. Who doubts that the German Americans would fight in our war against Germany, if it were a just war—if war be ever just; and who would doubt for a moment that the Italians, Russians and French would fight on our side if their governments should land soldiers on this continent? No one doubts it. They are caught by the contagious enthusiasm of our patriotism, and will outdo us; for they love America as no native can love it. Neither do I fear that they will fail us in fighting our greater battles against injustice and against corruption in high places. What I fear is that they will fight, that they will become one with the tumultuous mob, which may at any time arise and blindly demand its long deferred dividends for its share of labour, toil and suffering. I fear that we are gathering inflammable material from the dissatisfied of all the nations, who here may endeavour to reek vengeance upon all governments; a mass easily inflamed by demagogues and made a scourge in the land, when the land needs scourging. No nation has ever faced such a problem as we are facing; not only because of its gigantic proportions, nor because of its peculiar nature, but because of the fact that the nation’s weal or woe is being decided right before our very eyes; because its shroud or its wedding garment is now being woven, and we who live to-day may stretch our hands against the threads of the loom and say which it shall be. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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