Part 14

It was thus, by sinking our particular quarrel with George of England in the universal quarrel of humanity with injustice, that we emerged a distinct nation, with a unique mission in the world. And we revealed ourselves to the world in the Declaration of Independence, even as the Israelites revealed themselves in the Law of Moses. From the Declaration flows our race consciousness, our sense of what is and what is not American. Our laws, our policies, the successive steps of our progress,--all must conform to the spirit of the Declaration of Independence, the source of our national being.

The American confession of faith, therefore, is a recital of the doctrines of liberty and equality. A faithful American is one who understands these doctrines and applies them in his life.

ABRAHAM MITRIE RIHBANY

An intense seriousness is one of the prominent characteristics of the writings of the immigrant; for immigration is a serious and often a hazardous undertaking, as the immigrant best knows. But that he has not failed to appreciate the amusing side of the readjustment period is evidenced by the many touches of humor in his accounts of his relation to his new environment. One of the most pleasing and inspiriting of these accounts is “A Far Journey,” by Abraham M. Rihbany, who was born in Syria in the year 1869, and who came to the United States with little money, but with much native intelligence and an open and receptive mind and soul, eager for the very best that America has to give.

The bad effects of the gregariousness of the foreigner in America have frequently been pointed out and deplored; most writers on immigration have failed to see or mention any of its benefits. It is interesting to know the opinion on this vexing question of one who has himself passed safely through a critical transition period. Speaking of his own experience he says that the Syrian colony in New York “was a habitat so much like the one I had left behind me in Syria that its home atmosphere enabled me to maintain a firm hold on life in the face of the many difficulties which confronted me in those days, and just different enough to awaken my curiosity to know more about the surrounding American influences.” Impelled by the question, “Where is America?” and longing for “something more in the life of America than the mere loaves and fishes,” he determined to leave New York and “seek the smaller centers of population, where men came in friendly touch with one another, daily.”

AMERICA OFFERS SOMETHING BETTER THAN MONEY

I was told while in Syria that in America money could be picked up everywhere. That was not true. But I found that infinitely better things than money--knowledge, freedom, self-reliance, order, cleanliness, sovereign human rights, self-government, and all that these great accomplishments imply--can be picked up everywhere in America by whosoever earnestly seeks them. And those among Americans who are exerting the largest influence toward the solution of the “immigration problem” are, in my opinion, not those who are writing books on “good citizenship,” but those who stand before the foreigner as the embodiment of these great ideals.

The occasions on which I was made to feel that I was a foreigner--an alien--were so rare that they are not worth mentioning. My purpose in life, and the large, warm heart of America which opens to every person who aspires to be a good and useful citizen, made me forget that there was an “immigration problem” within the borders of this great Commonwealth. When I think of the thousand noble impulses which were poured into my soul in my early years in this country by good men and women in all walks of life; when I think of the many homes in which I was received with my uncomely appearance and with my crude manners, where women who were visions of elegance served me as an honored guest, of the many counsels of men of affairs which fed my strength and taught me the lasting value of personal achievements, and that America is the land of not only great privileges, but great responsibilities, I feel like saying (and I do say whenever I have the opportunity) to every foreigner, “When you really know what America is, when you are willing to share in its sorrows, as well as its joys, then you will cease to be a whining malcontent, will take your harp down from the willows, and will not call such a country ‘a strange land.’”

Of all the means of improvement other than personal associations with good men and women, the churches and the public schools gripped most strongly at the strings of my heart. Upon coming into town, the sight of the church spires rising above the houses and the trees as witnesses to man’s desire for God, always gave me inward delight. True, religion in America lacks to a certain extent the depth of Oriental mysticism; yet it is much more closely related than in the Orient to the vital issues of “the life which now is.” Often would I go and stand on the opposite side of the street from a public-school building at the hour of dismissal (and this passion still remains with me) just for the purpose of feasting my eyes on seeing the pupils pour out in squads, so clean and so orderly, and seemingly animated by all that is noblest in the life of this great nation. My soul would revel in the thought that no distinctions were made in those temples of learning between Jew and Gentile, Protestant and Catholic, the churched and the unchurched; all enjoyed the equality of privileges, shared equally in the intellectual and moral feast, and drank freely the spirit of the noblest patriotism.

AN IMMIGRANT TELLS HIS STRUGGLES WITH THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

My struggles with the English language (which have not yet ceased) were at times very hard. It is not at all difficult for me to realize the agonizing inward struggles of a person who has lost the power of speech. When I was first compelled to set aside my mother-tongue and use English exclusively as my medium of expression, the sphere of my life seemed to shrink to a very small disk. My pretentious purpose of suddenly becoming a lecturer on Oriental customs, in a language in which practically I had never conversed, might have seemed to any one who knew me like an act of faith in the miraculous gift of tongues. My youthful desire was not only to inform but to move my hearers. Consequently, my groping before an audience for suitable diction within the narrow limits of my uncertain vocabulary was often pitiable.

The exceptions in English grammar seemed to be more than the rules. The difference between the conventional and the actual sounds of such words as “victuals” and “colonel” seemed to me to be perfectly scandalous. The letter c is certainly a superfluity in the English language; it is never anything else but either k or s. In my native language, the Arabic, the accent is always put as near the end of the word as possible; in the English, as near the beginning as possible. Therefore, in using my adopted tongue, I was tossed between the two extremes and very often “split the difference” by taking a middle course. The sounds of the letters, v, p, and the hard g, are not represented in the Arabic. They are symbolized in transliteration by the equivalents of f, b, and k. On numerous occasions, therefore, and especially when I waxed eloquent, my tongue would mix these sounds hopelessly, to the amused surprise of my hearers. I would say “coal” when I meant “goal,” “pig man” for “big man,” “buy” for “pie,” “ferry” for “very,” and vice versa. For some time I had, of course, to think in Arabic and try to translate my thoughts literally into English, which practice caused me many troubles, especially in the use of the connectives. On one occasion, when an American gentleman told me that he was a Presbyterian, and I, rejoicing to claim fellowship with him, sought to say what should have been, “We are brethren in Christ,” I said, “We are brothers, by Jesus.” My Presbyterian friend put his finger on his lip in pious fashion, and, with elevated brows and a most sympathetic smile, said, “That is swearing!”

But in my early struggles with English, I derived much negative consolation from the mistakes Americans made in pronouncing my name. None of them could pronounce it correctly--Rih-bá-ny--without my assistance. I have been called Rib-beny, Richbany, Ribary, Laborny, Rabonie, and many other names. An enterprising Sunday School superintendent in the Presbyterian Church at Mansfield, Ohio, introduced me to his school by saying, “Now we have the pleasure of listening to Mr. Rehoboam!” The prefixing of “Mr.” to the name of the scion of King Solomon seemed to me to annihilate time and space, and showed me plainly how the past might be brought forward and made to serve the present.

EDWARD ALFRED STEINER

None of our immigrant authors has written with more earnestness of America and things American than Edward A. Steiner, who was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1866. Unlike the average immigrant, before coming to the United States he had received considerable education in the public schools of his native city, in the gymnasium at Pilsen, Bohemia, and at the University of Heidelberg. After passing through most of the hardships incident to the life of an alien, he was graduated from the Oberlin Theological Seminary and was ordained a minister of the Congregational Church. Several years were then spent in pastoral work, and in 1903 he was elected to the Chair of Applied Christianity at Grinnell College, Iowa. He is widely known both as a lecturer and an author, and among his numerous books may be mentioned “On the Trail of the Immigrant,” 1906; “Against the Current,” 1910; “From Alien to Citizen,” 1914; “Introducing the American Spirit,” 1915; “Nationalizing America,” 1916; “Confession of a Hyphenated American,” 1916. This last voices the sensitiveness so commonly felt by Americans of foreign and particularly German birth in the face of much unreasonable suspicion and prejudice prior to and at the entrance of the United States into the European War. “Nationalizing America” is perhaps his most searching book; for in this almost every American institution is scrutinized, the State, the Church, the school, and the industrial life being examined in their relation to the immigrant.

Selections from two chapters of this book (“The Stomach Line” and “History and the Nation”) have been combined under one title, “Industrialism and the Immigrant.” “The Criminal Immigrant” is taken from chapter fourteen of the autobiographical volume, “From Alien to Citizen.”

THE CRIMINAL IMMIGRANT

To recall prison experiences is not pleasant, and would not be profitable, if this were merely a narration of what happened to one individual, a quarter of a century ago. Conditions are not sufficiently changed, either in judicial procedure or in methods of punishment, to make this account of historic importance. Its value lies only in the fact that no changes have occurred, and that my experience then is still the common fate of multitudes of immigrants, who swell the criminal records of their race or group, and are therefore looked upon with dislike and apprehension.

The jail in which I found myself was an unredeemed, vermin-infested building, crowded by a motley multitude of strikers and strike breakers,--bitter enemies all, their animosity begotten in the elemental struggle for bread, and hating one another with an unmodified, primitive passion.

The strikers had the advantage over us, for they were more numerous and were acquainted with the ways of American officials. This gave them the opportunity (which they improved) to make it unpleasant for the “Hunkies.”

The straw mattress upon which I slept the first night was missing the second; salt more completely spoiled the mixture called by courtesy coffee, and the only thing which saved me from bodily hurt was the fact that there was no spot on me which was not already suffering.

I mention without malice and merely as a fact in race psychology, that the Irish were the most cruel to us, with the Germans a close second, while the Welsh were not only inoffensive, but sometimes kind.

One of them, David Hill--smaller than the ordinary Welshman, but with the courage of his Biblical namesake--stood between me and a burly Irish Goliath who wanted to thrash this particular “furriner, who came over here to take away the bread from the lips of dacent, law-abiding Americans.”

The jailer maintained no discipline and heeded no complaints. His task was to keep us locked up; the bars were strong and the key invariably turned.

The strikers gradually drifted from the jail, being bailed out or released, and I was not sorry to see them go.

Poor food, vermin of many varieties and the various small tortures endured, were all as nothing to me compared with the fact that for more than six weeks I was permitted to be in that jail without a hearing; without even the slightest knowledge on my part as to why I had forfeited my liberty.

From the barred jail window I could see the workmen going unhindered to their tasks; on Sunday pastor and people passed, as they went to worship their Lord who, too, was once a prisoner. None, seemingly, gave us a thought or even responded by a smile to the hunger for sympathy which I know my face must have expressed.

My letters to the Austro-Hungarian Consul remained unanswered, and the jailer gave my repeated questionings only oaths for reply.