Modern American Prose Selections | Page 9

doors by the dozens, doors
by the score, leading into him--but most of us keep our doors closed. It
is difficult for people to gain access to us; but there are some doors that
are open to the generality of mankind; and as those who are seeking to
know our fellow man and to reach him, it is our place to find what
those doors are and how those doors can be opened.
One of those doors might be labeled "our love for our children." That is
a door common to all. Another door might be labeled "our love for a
piece of land." Another door might be labeled "our common hatred of
injustice." Another door might be labeled "the need for human
sympathy." Another door might be labeled "fear of suffering." And
another door might be labeled "the hope that we all have in our hearts
that this world will turn into a better one."
Through some one of those doors every man can be reached; at least, if
not every man, certainly the great mass of mankind. They are not to be
reached through interest alone; they are not to be reached through mind;
they are reached through instincts and impulses and through tendencies;
and there is some word, some act that you or I can do or say that will
get inside of that strange, strange man and reveal him to himself and

reveal him to us and make him of use to the world.
We want to reach, through one of those doors, every man in the United
States who does not sympathize with us in a supreme allegiance to our
country. You would be amused to see some of the letters that come to
me, asking almost peremptorily what methods should be adopted by
which men and women can be Americanized, as if there were some one
particular prescription that could be given; as if you could roll up the
sleeve of a man and give him a hypodermic of some solution that
would, by some strange alchemy, transform him into a good American
citizen; as if you could take him water, and in it make a mixture--one
part the ability to read and write and speak the English language; then
another part, the Declaration of Independence; one part, the
Constitution of the United States; one part, a love for apple pie; one
part, a desire and a willingness to wear American shoes; and another
part, a pride in using American plumbing; and take all those together
and grind them up, and have a solution which you could put into a
man's veins and by those superficialities, transform him into a man who
loves America. No such thing can be done. We know it can not be done,
because we know those who read and write and speak the language and
they do not have that feeling. We know that we regard one who takes
his glass of milk and his apple pie for lunch as presumably a good
American. We know that there is virtue in the American bath. We
know that there are principles enunciated in the Declaration of
Independence and in the Constitution of the United States which are
necessary to get into one's system before he can thoroughly understand
the United States; and there are some who have those principles as a
standard for their lives, who yet have never heard of the Declaration of
Independence or of the Constitution of the United States. You can not
make Americans that way. You have got to make them by calling upon
the fine things that are within them, and by dealing with them in
sympathy; by appreciating what they have to offer us, and by revealing
to them what we have to offer them. And that brings to mind the
thought that this work must be a human work--must be something done
out of the human heart and speaking to the human heart, and must
largely turn upon instrumentalities that are in no way formal, and that
have no dogma and have no creed, and which can not be put into

writing, and can not be set upon the press--to a thought that I have had
in my mind for some time as to the advancing of a new organization in
this country--and, perhaps, you will sympathize with it--I have called it,
for lack of a better name, "The League of American Fellowship," and
there should be no condition for membership, excepting a pledge that
each one gives that each year, or for one year, the member will
undertake to interpret America sympathetically to at least one
foreign-born person, or one person in the United States who does not
have an understanding of American institutions, American traditions,
American history, American sports, American life, and