Franklin Roosevelt’s traditionalist sense of immigration and nationhood

While many conservatives see Franklin Roosevelt as the supreme liberal figure of the 20th century, we need to understand that on matters of national identity and immigration President Roosevelt was well to the right of most of today’s “conservatives.” On the 50th anniversary of the completion of the Statue of Liberty, October 28th, 1936, Roosevelt gave a speech at Liberty Island in New York Harbor in which he did not once pronounce the phrases “immigrant” or “immigration” or “nation of immigrants.” While movingly honoring the people who came to America in the past, he doesn’t make America’s acceptance of the immigrants the key thing, but the way the immigrants and their children became a part of and built up American civilization. American civilization is the key thing, not immigration. He also accepts without demur the radical reduction of immigration under the national quotas that started in 1921 and were made permanent in 1924. His acquiescence to the end of large-scale immigration may also be explained in part, but I think not in toto, by the Depression which would have drastically cut immigration to the U.S. even if the laws hadn’t. Nevertheless, whatever the factors that shaped FDR’s conservative outlook on the subject of immigration, his language breathes an air and bespeaks a context utterly different from what we’ve come to know in post-1960s America: not liberal ideology, not “we are the world,” but America and the American people. It’s as though he sees the Great Wave of immigration at the beginning of the twentieth century as a particular thing that happened in our history, that is a part of what America is, but is neither the definition of America (“a nation of immigrants”), nor a precedent dictating an ongoing imperative on our nation. Also note that instead of despising Europe and its civilization, as today’s “conservatives” do, he honors it.

For over three centuries a steady stream of men, women and children followed the beacon of liberty which this light symbolizes. They brought to us strength and moral fibre developed in a civilization centuries old but fired anew by the dream of a better life in America. They brought to one new country the cultures of a hundred old ones.

It has not been sufficiently emphasized in the teaching of our history that the overwhelming majority of those who came from the Nations of the Old World to our American shores were not the laggards, not the timorous, not the failures. They were men and women who had the supreme courage to strike out for themselves, to abandon language and relatives, to start at the bottom without influence, without money and without knowledge of life in a very young civilization. We can say for all America what the Californians say of the Forty-Niners: “The cowards never started and the weak died by the way.”

Perhaps Providence did prepare this American continent to be a place of the second chance. Certainly, millions of men and women have made it that. They adopted this homeland because in this land they found a home in which the things they most desired could be theirs—freedom of opportunity, freedom of thought, freedom to worship God. Here they found life because here there was freedom to live.

It. is the memory of all these eager seeking millions that makes this one of America’s places of great romance. Looking down this great harbor I like to think of the countless numbers of inbound vessels that have made this port. I like to think of the men and women who, with the break of dawn off Sandy Hook, have strained their eyes to the west for a first glimpse of the New World.

They came to us—most of them—in steerage. But they, in their humble quarters, saw things in these strange horizons which were denied to the eyes of those few who traveled in greater luxury.

They came to us speaking many tongues—but a single language, the universal language of human aspiration.

How well their hopes were justified is proved by the record of what they achieved. They not only found freedom in the New World, but by their effort and devotion they made the New World’s freedom safer, richer, more far-reaching, more capable of growth.

Within this present generation, that stream from abroad has largely stopped. We have within our shores today the materials out of which we shall continue to build an even better home for liberty. [emphasis added.]

We take satisfaction in the thought that those who have left their native land to join us may still retain here their affection for some things left behind—old customs, old language, old friends. Looking to the future, they wisely choose that their children shall live in the new language and in the new customs of this new people. And those children more and more realize their common destiny in America. That is true whether their forebears came past this place eight generations ago or only one.

How utterly different in tone and content this is from the vile, universalistic, “America is only an idea” rhetoric we’ve been pounded on the heads with since the 1980s, by Republican as well as Democratic politicians! Indeed, when FDR says, “We have within our shores today the materials out of which we shall continue to build an even better home for liberty,” he conveys a bracing sense of national self-sufficiency that echoes Thomas Jeffersons’ great first inaugural address, where Jefferson speaks of the American people as

Kindly separated by nature and a wide ocean from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe; too high-minded to endure the degradations of the others; possessing a chosen country, with room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation …

In a second speech President Roosevelt gave that same day, at Roosevelt Park in New York City, as in the earlier speech at Liberty Island, the word “immigrant” once again does not appear. The word “democracy” does not appear. “Free” and “Freedom” appear a total of six times, but they are in the context of (1) a moral order, and (2) a cultural and civilizational order. For example:

I have just come from the ceremonies at the Statue of Liberty. I suggested there that we should rededicate that Statue not to liberty alone but also to peace. I spoke there of the steady stream of human resources which the Old World poured on our shores and out of which our American civilization has been built….

They have never been—they are not now—half-hearted Americans. In Americanization classes and at night schools they have burned the midnight oil in order to be worthy of their new allegiance.

They were not satisfied merely to find here the realization of the material hopes which had guided them from their native land. They were not satisfied merely to build a material home for themselves and their families.

They were intent also upon building a place for themselves in the ideals of America. They sought an assurance of permanency in the new land for themselves and their children based upon active participation in its civilization and culture. [Emphasis added.]

Now see President Roosevelt’s treatment of the meaning of liberty. For Roosevelt, liberty is truly liberty under law and under moral constraints, an understanding that was in the air of the America I grew up in, but that has since virtually vanished from our culture:

Those who have come here of late understand and appreciate our free institutions and our free opportunity, as well as those who have been here for many generations. The great majority of the new and the old do not confuse the word “liberty” with the word “license.” They appreciate that the American standard of freedom does not include the right to do things which hurt their neighbors. All of us, old-comers and new-comers, agree that for the speculator to gamble with and lose the savings of the clients of his bank is just as contrary to American ideals of liberty as it is for the poor man to upset the peddler’s cart and steal his wares.

I thank Spencer Warren for bringing these speeches to my attention. They are of key importance in showing the more sound understanding of the meaning of America that was common only a few decades ago, and expressed by a liberal Democratic president.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 14, 2005 09:16 AM | Send