Talk:Close-in Lands of Adventure
| Information about this edition | |
|---|---|
| Edition: | Extracted from Adventure magazine, March 20 1925, p. 163. |
| Source: | https://archive.org/details/adventurev051n0519250320 |
| Contributor(s): | ragpicker |
| Proofreaders: | ragcleaner |
A letter from Spears to the Editor. From the Camp-Fire section of the issue, pp. 182–183.
THIS is out of a personal letter from Raymond S. Spears of our writers' brigade and “Ask Adventure.” You may remember I printed his letter in favor of Prohibition and my reply along with it. Before doing so I sent him my reply to make sure there was in it no offense when none was intended. What follows is from his answer, saying he found none, and was added merely from the fullness of his heart. A very American heart.
WHAT he says I commend particularly to our foreign-born Americans. What we call “Americanization” is tragically incomplete and ineffective. The blame therefor lies with us native-born, not with our immigrant citizens. Careless, we leave them to form their idea of America by looking about them. What they see is mostly selfishness and greed—and natural resources. The better things they can not see, and we have been at little pains to show them.
But these better things exist. Nearly buried under the gross materialism that grips us abide still some of the ideals planted here by the forefathers who came to the wilderness for religious and political freedom and made stronger by each ax-blow, rifle-shot and plowed furrow of pioneer ancestors turning three-thousand miles of continent into America They came and pioneered for gain as well as for liberty and ideals, but the very nature of what they had to do was cleansing and freeing to them as a people.
THE foreign-born are rather inclined to resent any claim that the native-born are better Americans than they. Why shouldn't they sneer? After all, we are not such particularly noble animals to look at and such virtues as we have are, many of them, not displayed on the surface. It is, of course, our own fault, but the foreign-born generally fail to consider below the surface. The spirit that out of a wilderness erected a nation to take its place among the others in only a tenth the time required to erect those others, that in so doing took one of the world's biggest strides toward human liberty and justice, that in three short centuries not only turned the wilderness into one of the world's most advanced and powerful nations—well, it takes that kind of spirit a long time to die and it passes on in the blood from one generation to the next. Pioneering and real building breed qualities that can not come from a mere living in some old civilization and we native-born of today are only a step away from pioneering days. Many Western pioneers still live; in the Middle West the fathers and grandfathers of living Americans did the pioneering. In the East it is not much farther back to the days when there was a wild Indian border. Good things have come to today's native-born Americans. These constitute America's best ideals. Not easy to see under our growing materialism but—here. Not better than others' perhaps, but not found in the same kind elsewhere. Individual, America's, ours. And good.
For example, our country, since it became a nation, has known no other rule than democracy. Our immigrants come from countries upon which ages of depotism have been imprinted. The inherited instinct of centuries is not wiped out in a generation or two. Which of them can boast a century and a half of democracy? We are young, yes, but in democracy it is the ether nations who are the parvenus. Indeed, our government has existed in its present form longer than any other “civilized” government in the world.
NO, THE foreign-born may be fully as good folk as we are, but they have not in them the inheritance to make them as good Americans. Just as, if we immigrated to Italy, for example, we could not, because of our different inheritance, become in a generation or two as good Italians as the native-born Italians.
There are native-born Americans as low as the lowest, and foreign-born as good as the best. But that doesn't alter the case. There is no cause to praise us or to blame them. It is simply that we were born and bred to the job of being Americans. They were born and bred to the job of being something else.
The one point I'm driving at is that our inherited equipment for being Americans in the best sense of the word is not some thing to boast about, but an obligation. An obligation we haven't met creditably. The foreign-born as a human being is as good as we are, allowing for the fact that we don't always get a type up to the mother country's own average. The foreign-born is good material for American citizenship. Good material. He can't automatically become a good American citizen merely by remaining here a while and taking out some papers. It's our job to teach him how to change from a good Italian, English, Polish, etc., into a good American citizen, and how to make his children into still better American citizens. And we don't do it and never have done it. Some day I hope we shall.
AND one of the ways to do it is to let him see occasionally what a really good native-born American citizen is like inside. He doesn't often get the chance. Many of us are bad Americans and bad everything eke, but there abide in some of us the things worth while—the hidden ideals that made America, that in their day led the world in the march toward freedom and that may yet triumph over the materialism that sweeps us now—us and the remainder of the “civilized” world.
So here is one glimpse at what goes on inside a really good native-born American. Mr. Spears did not write it with any such idea in mind. That is why it is valuable—it is unconscious, from the heart. Nothing is said about native-born vs foreign-born, nothing about the duties of citizenship. The writer does not even know I'm passing it on to you. I've not asked his permission; he'll have to let me use it because it ought to be used.
My feeling is, that New York is America's great Mecca. Those who have arrived there seem to lose touch with The Sticks. I see this in countless things. You see, I lived in New York eight years, four as a boy, four as a man. Letters, editorials, comments, even letters on rejected and accepted manuscripts disclose—what shall I call it?—lack of sympathy, lack of knowledge, lack of iunderstandng—I might say impatience toward certain aspects of the spirit of the small towns, the farms, the woodlands, the prairies, the mountains. It is as though the echoes of the oceanic surf that rolls up on the strands of Manhattan's shores are missed along Broadway and in the din of Third Avenue and Harlem. Why should the successful listen to those who never arrive?
I SPEND my life listening, watching, trying with all I have to catch the refrain of abiding faith that is our American courage and hope, longing beyond expression to get it down in words, between the lines. The spirit of America is fair play, and alcohol never played fair. Our people toil forward, not knowing they move; they look up, and are astonished to see the miles they have come—Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt; where is taxation without representation, tribute to foreign powers, slavery and, now, alcohol? And by and by, the emancipation, political, of women will be seen as a the marvelous American accomplishment, perhaps greatest of our people's.
I worship the cool hearts of brave men, because I have known much fear. I sit at the feet of the courageous because we all know that nothing—not wit, not science, not any known thing—will go forward without carelessness of intrepid heroism. The spirit of adventure is the banner-carrier of all humanity's accomplishments toward that dull day of peace and satisfaction when nothing more remains to be endured or done. To some are given great tasks, which they do, and to some are trivial and little putterings. Perhaps we do not really any of us know what is right, except helping the other fellow be a bit happier, or what is wrong, except cruelty to the weak and defenseless—and I doubt if any man or woman, looking back, can know his work's importance, nor does any contemporary. Who knows, for example, what Ask Adventure letter may not change the destinies of a boy, who in turn may change the history of peoples?—Spears.