Americans by Choice

note 1: Second Report of the Provost Marshal General to the Secretary of War, on the Selective Service System to December 20, 1918, p. 90, Table 23.

We have no figures to show how many of those aliens and declarants registered in the registration of September 12, 1918, were below the age of 21 years; therefore it is not possible to say just what proportion were available for naturalization under the special provisions of the law of May 9th. The previous registration had applied altogether to men above the age of 21, and of course all of those in the subsequently registered class 32–45 were naturalizable so far as age was concerned.

The classification of registrants under the registration of September 12, 1918, never was completed, being stopped by the armistice of November 11th; therefore the availability for service of the citizens and aliens has been reported only for those between the ages of 21 and 31. Of the 1,703,006 aliens and declarants of this age classification, a little less than one in three (538,363—31.61 per cent) had declared intention. The fitness of these for service is shown by the following analysis:

As the Provost Marshal General says, in discussing the intricate legal situation which the legislation of May 9, 1918, was calculated in part to meet, “it was realized that, from the point of view of international law, not all aliens stood on the same footing in this country.” He analyzed the differences as follows:[129]

The situation described in paragraph (c) was the one under force of which Congress, in the Selective Service Act of May 18, 1917, based the draft “upon liability to military service of all male citizens, or male persons, not alien enemies, who have declared their intention to become citizens,” between the designated ages. As the Provost Marshal General pointed out in his first report, heretofore quoted, the exemption of alien nondeclarants would have created great injustice in the enforcement of the local quotas in states and regions disparate in the ratios of native born and aliens; therefore, in legislation of May and June, 1918, Congress changed the basis of apportionment to meet this inequity, and incidentally so that thereafter it became incumbent upon the alien to bear the burden of proof of his right to exemption.

It is fair to assume, as the Provost Marshal General said,[130]

Legal advisory boards were established to aid registrants—the courts generally upheld the right of out-and-out aliens to exemption—moreover, in regions where there were large numbers of aliens, the local draft boards often, if not usually, included men of foreign race or descent as well as men interested in and closely familiar with the foreign-born population, who took every pains to inform the ignorant and protect them in their rights. On the whole, it is highly probable that the spirit of the law in this regard was substantially observed throughout the country. The Naturalization Bureau—virtually helpless as it was to prove or disprove claims of alleged nondeclarants—had referred to it more than 50,000 cases.

FOREIGN BORN EAGER TO SERVE

The Provost Marshal General declares that the mass of foreign-born residents were themselves permeated by the spirit of readiness to waive their exemptions and voluntarily accepted the call to military service.[132]

There came eventually into being a “Foreign Legion,” made up principally of nondeclarant aliens, a large proportion of whom, because of birth within the territorial sovereignty of Austria-Hungary, were technically enemy aliens. Their spirit is well exemplified in a letter written by one such “enemy alien” at a time before the army had awakened to the fact that these men, whatever the technicalities of the prevailing political geography might seem to show, were Allies in spirit, with better cause to fight their titular sovereign than any other sort of American; the author was a Jugo-Slav, who had been offered exemption because of his “Austrian” nationality:

The provisions for immediate naturalization turned the “Foreign Legion” into a legion of citizens, and took out of the category of aliens thousands of men of like spirit. As for those of neutral nationality who withdrew their declarations of intention in accordance with the provision made by Congress, and lapsed into purely alien status, the following tabulation from the second report of the Provost Marshal General, although only partially complete, is illuminating:[133]

Of the significance and extent of the response to the opportunity for immediate naturalization, the Provost Marshal General says:[134]

AUSTRIANS WHO WERE NOT FOR AUSTRIA

Concerning the technically enemy aliens of the Austro-Hungarian allegiance, the same report shows that when Austria-Hungary became an enemy nation in December, 1917, it affected the status of some 239,000 registrants, and that thereupon the camps were found to contain “thousands of Austro-Hungarian declarants, not deferred on ordinary grounds, and also a large number (probably about 9,000) of Austro-Hungarian nondeclarants who had waived their alienage exemption.”[135]

“A great majority of these men,” says the Provost Marshal General, “were of the oppressed races of Austria-Hungary, and therefore sympathetic with the cause of the Allies and ready to remain in camp.” As an evidence of this the report cites the fact that in one camp, regarded as typical in absence of complete returns called for by the Adjutant General of the army in October, 1918, as to the aliens who desired discharge or were suitable for discharge under the head of enemy aliens:[136]

THERE WAS HUMAN WAR-TIME PSYCHOLOGY

It would have been less than human, in the hectic state of public feeling conditioning all the preparations for war, had there not been instances—perhaps very many instances—in which aliens were enlisted in spite or in ignorance of their right to exemption; in which they were virtually forced by local sentiment, displayed in various more or less illegal and outrageous ways, to join the army; but, on the whole, those who either actually or by default waived their exemption were willing soldiers, and their performances were quite equal in fidelity and courage to those of the native-born or naturalized citizens.

The Provost Marshal General is to some degree candid about this:[137]

DIPLOMATIC REQUESTS FOR EXEMPTION

The list of these protests is interesting; it is arranged here in the order of the number of cases, but for a fair assessment of the sentiment value involved, one should take into consideration the war status, and the relative proportions, of the nationalities represented in the total registration. These statistics are not in all cases available; but so far as the report of the Provost Marshal General gives them, they are given in the last column:

RECIPROCAL CONSCRIPTION AMONG COBELLIGERENTS

A large factor in the diplomatic interchanges arising out of induction or attempted induction of aliens into the military service was the situation regarding cobelligerents. It does not call for extended description here; suffice it to say that the policy of reciprocal conscription and of crediting registrants, whether citizens or aliens, with the fact of their enlistment under the flag of any of the Allied nations, largely relieved this situation, so far as the nondeclarant alien was concerned. A collateral development was the upgrowth of desire on the part of representatives of the oppressed races of Central Europe to organize armed forces under their own commanders, and to proceed more or less independently to the battle line. Of this the Provost Marshal General says:[138]

OF GERMAN DESCENT, BUT LOYAL AMERICANS

The Provost Marshal General takes occasion to pay high tribute to the thousands of registrants of German stock who “loyally stood by the American flag,” notwithstanding the “natural distrust” at first attending them in public opinion, “and the notorious intrigues of the German government to secure their support.” The opportunity afforded to such of them as could satisfy the courts and the Naturalization Service of their loyalty, to become American citizens, was availed of by them in large numbers. It is regrettable that, as the Provost Marshal General says:[139]

DESERTION, AMONG ALIENS AND CITIZENS

It has been asserted by ill-informed persons representing on the one hand those who attribute inherent deficiencies and evil tendencies to the immigrant as such, and on the other those who seem to think that the immigrant as such is somehow superior to the native-born American, either that the desertions from the army or evasions of military service were inordinately numerous on the part of foreign born as compared with the native born; or, per contra, that “the proportion of desertions among the native born is about twice as great as among the foreign born.”[140] In point of exact fact and essential justice, neither of these views is justified. The Provost Marshal General deals directly, and with broad justice, with this situation:[141]

The figures upon which the Provost Marshal General thus comments are given by him in Table XXXIV.[142]

It is clear from these figures, and regardless of the allowances made by the Provost Marshal General, as quoted above, that nearly 11 out of every 100 aliens registered, as against a little more than 3 out of every 100 citizens, who, in one way or another evaded or sought to evade the draft; also that it is simply not true that “the proportion of desertions among the native born was about twice as great as among the foreign born.” True, the citizen-deserter percentage of the whole number of registrants is 2.71, as against an alien-deserter percentage of 1.75 ... but there were nearly six times as many citizen registrants as alien. In order even to equal the alien ratio, the citizen deserters would have had to be considerably more than three times as numerous as they were. But no such plausible excuses could have been made for them! There are no available figures to show how many of the citizens who thus evaded service were of foreign birth.

WAR’S TEST OF “THE MELTING-POT”

The essential quality of manhood in America was tested in all this business, and gave the lie direct alike to those Americans who were wont to sneer at the alien among us, and to the German autocracy which counted upon those of German descent in this country to prove disloyal to America. “The cosmopolitan composition of our population was never more strikingly disclosed,” says the Provost Marshal General, “than by the recent events of the World War. Then the melting pot stood in the fierce fires of the national emergency; and its contents, heated in the flames, either fused into the compact mass or floated off as dross.” And he goes on to say:[143]

It is no part of the province of this volume to multiply words about the way in which these adopted citizens of every racial blood gave account of themselves in the thousand ways of war service under their new-pledged flag. That is history, which, as General Crowder said, can be read broad upon the face of every list of those who fell—foreign and native born side by side, their intermingling blood poured forth for “America.” The diary of a German officer, found on the battlefield,[144] tells what the common enemy found:

AN OLD PRACTICE WITH A NEW SIGNIFICANCE

Who shall forecast the effect of this wholesale admission of aliens to full citizenship and potential political power in the United States? How many of these men were among those whom, in earlier proceedings, the rigorous precautions of the past had kept at arm’s length? They came up in courts far from their home jurisdiction; no longer was the esteem of neighbor a prerequisite; no longer was it necessary to have lived even one year in any particular vicinage—or, indeed, to have any residence at all! There can be no checking up, even now, to see whether even a criminal record should have debarred the applicant; the Bureau of Naturalization was more than 500,000 behind in the examination of naturalization certificates even before this flood of new ones was poured in upon its overworked force!

In the old days, before the establishment of the Naturalization Service, there was hurried admission of thousands of aliens, regardless of qualifications, within short periods, and it was deemed a dreadful menace to our institutions. Of course this was very different from every point of view; but was the difference sufficient to guarantee real assimilation into the spirit that we like to believe characterizes sound American citizenship?

WHAT SOME JUDGES THOUGHT OF IT

The questions addressed by the Americanization Study in the summer of 1919 to the naturalizing judges throughout the country included this question:

The paucity and hesitation, even reluctance, of the replies are a striking evidence of the impossibility of answering the question. Of 356 judges who gave any attention at all to the question, 110 frankly declared themselves unable to express any opinion whatever. Thirteen were in grave doubt, inclining to the negative; 16 said only, “I hope so”; 108 replied flatly, “No.” The others (109) in various phrases expressed their affirmative. But many of these affirmatives were greatly qualified. Some thought the advantage applied only or chiefly to those soldiers who had volunteered; others believed that the mental and physical training and the psychological effect of imperiling his life for the flag would offset the evils involved in hasty admission of the otherwise unqualified individual. Many argued that, whatever the doubts about the wisdom of the policy, it was “only fair,” “it is their right,” “you cannot deny citizenship to a man whom you compel to fight for the country,” etc.

“I held up about 68 Germans and Austrians,” says one judge, whose vote was an emphatic “No”; “but the government at Washington advised taking them in—and they were.”

In a number of instances the judges declared that they went against their own judgment in admitting men whom they regarded as unfit—naturalizing them only upon the insistence of the representatives of the Naturalization Service. An eloquent illustration of the about-face in the policy of the Bureau!

“No, decidedly!” cried a Michigan judge. “It was a colossal blunder!”

“An impulsive act of Congress,” answers another; while an Iowa judge voices the opinion of many in saying:

Among these judges were several worthy of note who officiated at the naturalization of very large numbers of soldiers. The striking fact is that these, almost without exception, were in various degrees enthusiastic in their expressions of belief that the policy was a good one. Some contented themselves with a mere “Yes” for answer. Among these was one who naturalized more than 10,000 men at one of the great camps of debarkation. Here are a few characteristic expressions from others:

HERE WAS “ATTACHMENT TO OUR PRINCIPLES”!

The completion of the nationalizing process is marked for every essential spiritual purpose, as Professor Weatherly said,[146] “when the things of the spirit are held in common and cherished by all,” or, as Renan expresses it, when the people “have a common glory,” by reason of having “done great things together.”

How may a man more convincingly show his “attachment to the principles of the Constitution,” his benevolence toward “the good order and happiness” of his country, than by imperiling his life for it? “Greater love hath no man than this.”

A candidate for naturalization, in ordinary conditions exhibiting knowledge of the legal relationship between the Federal and state governments, knowing the name of the President of the United States, the date of the battle of Bunker Hill, the cause of Shay’s Rebellion, and when the yellow fever came to Boston, may have no more idea of what the flag of the United States means and might mean than he has of the mental processes of the ichthyosaurus; his very plenitude of intellectual accomplishment may indeed make him only the greater menace to the essential welfare of his community.

But when he becomes a citizen in the very act and fact of going forth under that flag to lay down his life for what it stands for—what better thing can he do, what better evidence can he offer, of his “inward and self-imposed sense of obligation?” Nay, more, how better may he show that he is enlisting in the service of his new country something that was kindred in the old? There was a ringing challenge to all our smug self-sufficiency in what the Bohemians bore on their banner in that Cleveland parade:

Americans, Do Not Be Discouraged:
We Have Been Fighting These Tyrants
For Three Hundred Years!

Many of us looked upon these men as somehow sneaking into a privilege, overlooking the fact that they were bringing us a gift!

ASSIMILATING THE ENEMIES OF TYRANNY

We are hardly yet awake to the wonder of what happened, to the magnitude of the work of national assimilation that took place all in a moment. We were very stupid about it. One of the most important officers of our army, charged with great responsibility in the preparations for the war, naïvely confessed some time after the United States had entered upon it, that he did not know who were the Czecho-Slovaks, or from what part of the world they came! And it was only with the greatest difficulty that the army authorities were made to realize that most of the races making up that political nightmare known as Austria-Hungary desired nothing so much as the chance to help overthrow the unspeakable tyranny from which they had fled, against which they and their fathers had “been fighting for three hundred years.” Better than the Allies themselves they understood the cause of the Allies, yet to the American army authorities they were only “enemy aliens”!

It was in keeping with our statistical customs, not only in the Naturalization and Immigration Bureaus, but in the very census itself, to class an Austrian as an Austrian, knowing little and caring less about the world of difference between a Magyar and a Czech, between a Croat and a Slovak—though all were “Austrians” to the superficial eye of the census enumerator—and the General Staff of the United States army, which was going to war against “Austria” with absurdly, unpardonably vague, notions as to what an “Austrian” might be! It required a vigorous campaign of education before there could emerge even a fair, working intelligence in this regard; but emerge it finally did, and the anti-Austrian “Austrians” at last got their chance to go forth as American citizens under the Stars and Stripes to help give the coup de grâce to the old oppressor of themselves, their fathers, and their fathers’ fathers.

EPISODES OF MILITARY NATURALIZATION

In one army division, at Fort Riley, Kansas, thirty nationalities were represented by the candidates for citizenship, including not only the pseudo-Austrians, but Rumania, Serbia, Bulgaria, Montenegro, Armenia, Syria, Guatemala, Honduras, the Azores, and most of the rest of the civilized world. At Fort Riley was made the record of “forty-three citizens in forty minutes.” At Camp Devens, Massachusetts, more than 2,000 men were admitted to citizenship and took the oath of allegiance in one operation, lined up on the parade-ground by nationalities. A New York State court naturalized soldiers of fifty-six racial varieties on the first day of the visiting court.

In a session of court held in a Tennessee encampment the court crier opened the ceremonies with his, “Oyez! Oyez!” and a procession of dignitaries, military and civil, marched in under the flags for the ceremonial—a solemn invocation, an address by a venerable judge, and the crash of “The Star-spangled Banner.” Then the general made a speech, in which he welcomed each of those who a little while before had been “strangers and foreigners,” and dubbed him “one of our men.”

“Fellow citizens, comrades!” he struck home with booming voice in his peroration, “we will lash ourselves together with hoops of steel, and go forth to avenge the outrages that have been committed. There is no power on earth that can keep us from our purpose!”

Some soldier started the song, “Keep the Home Fires Burning,” and the aliens of a little while before, many of them hardly knowing the English word, joined in, with lusty emphasis upon and new significance in the refrain,

“Till the boys come home!”

Down in Alabama, a government official at a similar session apostrophized Liberty in strident Polish, followed by a second lieutenant in similar vein, but in Italian; and even those of other tongues, including English, who could not understand the words, knew well enough or felt in their hearts the drift of it.

As has been said, some got across without naturalization, and one aftermath of that was an extraordinary scene in the Walter Reid Hospital at Washington. The opportunity returned to the wounded there, in dramatic guise. An orderly walked through the wards summoning all men who desired to become citizens to gather at once in the library, to be taken before the judge.

There was a scrambling from cots, men with missing limbs, lads with heavily bandaged faces, soldiers in every manner of hospital négligé. The thump of crutches was heard along the halls—more than a hundred answered the first call. When the officer in charge looked over the battered and motley assembly, saw the lame and helpless being assisted into motor vehicles for the journey to court, he gave an order designed to produce more formal dress for another occasion, but did not dampen the ardor of that going! And before the judge they held up their hands, or stumps of hands, and swore their fealty to the country to which already they had given better proof.

Out at Camp Zachary Taylor, near Louisville, Kentucky, is a great ash tree, now come to be known as “Naturalization Tree.” Its arms, in benediction, have been spread out over many hundreds of new citizens as they took the oath of allegiance and marched away upon their first American duty. That tree is for them a monument, a memorial of a Great Occasion.

In one of the Eastern camps three officers, helping the Naturalization Service in this business, looked up at one another in the spell of a common thought:

“Here we are, Major Schmidt, Captain Pulaski, and Lieutenant Martinelli”—such might have been their names; they were of races as various—“all of foreign birth, helping to make Americans!”

’Twas a pregnant thought, and it typified what was going on all over the country, in preparation for the “doing of great things together,” for the new nation’s acquisition of “a common glory in the past ... a will to do still greater things in the future.”

In the varied procession that passed on this errand before just one court came a Gentleman from Verona and a Merchant of Venice, as the judge himself styled them; a Filipino who had served two years in the Philippine constabulary; an Abyssinian count, born in Somaliland and claiming kinship to King Menelik and to speak twenty-seven languages. Then there was Dugga Ram, a Hindu, whom the judge made an exception to the rule against Asiatics; and the man from Russian Poland, who denied having any sovereign at all; the Armenian who said he would refuse citizenship if to get it he had to acknowledge himself a Turkish subject; the technically alien color sergeant who had served for years in the regular army and had been wounded in the Philippines.

An old soldier of the Civil War, still an alien in the eyes of the law, a Kentuckian seventy-six years old with a wife and six children, all born on this soil, and Americans beyond cavil, took advantage of the opportunity to file his tattered old army discharge of 1865 in lieu of “first papers.” There will be, till he dies, two Great Dates in that old fellow’s life—1861, when, like the aliens of this war, he pledged his life to maintain the United States, and 1918, when the United States formally accepted him into full recorded fealty and fellowship. Yet the Fact had been a human reality for nearly sixty years!

There were not a few officers who had been commissioned in oversight of the fact that their alienage legally should have barred them. The defect was swiftly removed. And there were English and Irish and Scotch and Welsh—and others, too—who had been here so many years and were so saturated with all that is essential of Americanism that their naturalization seemed a formality almost absurdly superfluous.

To all of these at various times and under diverse conditions—sometimes in glaring noonday inbreaks of dreary camp routine; sometimes at night in the last hours before the grim setting forth for France—great words were spoken to solemnize and signalize the transaction. Perhaps the best of all was that tense sentence of General Bell: