Aliens or Americans?. Howard B. Grose
PREFACE
It is not a question as to whether the aliens will come. They have come, millions of them; they are now coming, at the rate of a million a year. They come from every clime, country, and condition; and they are of every sort: good, bad, and indifferent, literate and illiterate, virtuous and vicious, ambitious and aimless, strong and weak, skilled and unskilled, married and single, old and young, Christian and infidel, Jew and pagan. They form to-day the raw material of the American citizenship of to-morrow. What they will be and do then depends largely upon what our American Protestant Christianity does for them now.
Immigration—the foreign peoples in America, who and where they are, whence they come, and what under our laws and liberties and influences they are likely to become—this is the subject of our study. The subject is as fascinating as it is vital. Its problems are by far the most pressing, serious, and perplexing with which the American people have to do. It is high time that our young people were familiarizing themselves with the facts, for this is preëminently the question of to-day. Patriotism and religion—love of country and love of Christ—unite to urge thoughtful consideration of this great question: Aliens or Americans? One aim of this book is to show our individual responsibility for the answer, and how we can discharge it.
Immigration may be regarded as a peril or a providence, an ogre or an obligation—according to the point of view. The Christian ought to see in it the unmistakable hand of God opening wide the door of evangelistic opportunity. Through foreign missions we are sending the gospel to the ends of the earth. As a home mission God is sending the ends of the earth to our shores and very doors. The author is a Christian optimist who believes God has a unique mission for Christian America, and that it will ultimately be fulfilled. While the facts are in many ways appalling, the result of his study of the foreign peoples in our country has made him hopeful concerning their Americanization and evangelization, if only American Christians are awake and faithful to their duty. The Christian young people, brought to realize that immigration is another way of spelling obligation, must do their part to remove that tremendous IF.
These newcomers are in reality a challenge to American Christianity. The challenge is clear and imperative. Will we give the gospel to the heathen in America? Will we extend the hand of Christian brotherhood and helpfulness to the stranger within our gates? Will we Christianize, which is the only real way to Americanize, the Aliens? May this book help to inspire the truly Christian answer that shall mean much for the future of our country, and hence of the world.
The author makes grateful acknowledgment to all who have assisted by suggestion or otherwise. He has tried to give credit to the authors whose works he has used. He is under special obligation for counsel and many courtesies to Josiah Strong, one of the modern patriot-prophets who has sought to awaken Americans to their Christian duty and privilege.
Howard B. Grose.
Briarcliff Manor, June, 1906.
INTRODUCTION
A million immigrants!
A million opportunities!
A million obligations!
This in brief is the message of Aliens or Americans?
A young man who came to this country young enough to get the benefit of our public schools, and who then took a course in Columbia University, writes: "Now, at twenty-one, I am a free American, with only one strong desire; and that is to do something for my fellow-men, so that when my time comes to leave the world, I may leave it a bit the better." These are the words of a Russian Jew; and that Russian is a better American, that Jew is a better Christian, than many a descendant of the Pilgrim Fathers.
In this country every man is an American who has American ideals, the American spirit, American conceptions of life, American habits. A man is foreign not because he was born in a foreign land, but because he clings to foreign customs and ideas.
I do not fear foreigners half so much as I fear Americans who impose on them and brutally abuse them. Such Americans are the most dangerous enemies to our institutions, utterly foreign to their true spirit. Such Americans are the real foreigners.
Most of those who come to us are predisposed in favor of our institutions. They are generally unacquainted with the true character of those institutions, but they all know that America is the land of freedom and of plenty, and they are favorably inclined toward the ideas and the obligations which are bound up with these blessings. They are open to American influence, and quickly respond to a new and a better environment.
They naturally look up to us, and if with fair and friendly treatment we win their confidence, they are easily transformed into enthusiastic Americans. But if by terms of opprobrium, such as "sheeny" and "dago," we convince them that they are held in contempt, and if by oppression and fraud we render them suspicious of us, we can easily compact them into masses, hostile to us and dangerous to our institutions and organized for the express purpose of resisting all Americanizing influences.
Whether immigrants remain Aliens or become Americans depends less on them than on ourselves.
Josiah Strong.
New York, June 26, 1906.
We may well ask whether this insweeping immigration is to foreignize us, or we are to Americanize it. Our safety demands the assimilation of these strange populations, and the process of assimilation becomes slower and more difficult as the proportion of foreigners increases.
—Josiah Strong.
I
THE ALIEN ADVANCE
"And Elisha prayed, and said, Jehovah,