OCTOBER, 1924
Page Fifteen
THE UNITED AMERICAN
that accident of American birth, and you are well
satisfied with it. You have no ingrained objection
to our form of government, you have not been per
secuted or starved in a war-tom continent such as
Europe is to-day, nor have you been denied an educa
tion. You are blest with most of the things that
few immigrants possess when they come to Ellis
Island.
Nevertheless we may well make the imaginary
shift, hard as it may be, because only in that way
can we begin to see things as the immigrant sees
them. So, if you please, we shall suppose that times
are hard — (yes, that has happened, here in Amer
ica), that you have lost your job, and can not get
another, that your savings have disappeared, and
that you have been foreclosed out of your home,
and that your wife and children are hungry. Then
a cousin who went to France five years ago writes
back and sends you the money to buy steamship
tickets for yourself and family — for France. He
says there are chances in France. So you sell your
few bits of furniture and you get up and get out
and go to France, with your wife and children, to
live and die a Frenchman, with never a thought of
changing back to America again.
All right, now you are there, in France, with your
family, with a knowledge of France bounded by “ah
oui” and “fini la guerre,” with a profound distaste
for cooked rabbits, and with a sudden deepening
realization that in everything you encounter, from
omelets to umbrellas, from lilies to cathedrals, there
is always, somewhere, that smiting smell of invisible
garlic. Yes, it is quite different. For ham and eggs
you get artichokes and hard labor, for bathtubs they
give you dry sponges, for Pullman “palace” cars they
substitute a string of little jerkwater packing boxes,
and for snow they drown you in rain, rain, rain —
how it does pour down, day after day! Not yet do
you know the beauty, valor and history, the comedy
and tragedy of “La belle France;” nor yet do you
know a word of instinctive French; nor yet, by a
long shot are you able to cope with the jumping-jack
antics of the French franc after your restful ex
perience with that stolid and stable old American
dollar that you used to know “back in the old
country” —7 in Kentucky or Maine or California. It
is all very different indeed. “In God we trust,” still,
the way you did back home; but you are not so sure.
Yet there you are, at the gate in Havre or Cher
bourg, or five short years beyond the gate, in Fland
ers or the Midi, still trying to learn French and
be a good Frenchman in your new adopted country
— France! Can you imagine it? Well, neither
can I. Still less can I imagine your turning into
a real Frenchman because a fellow with brass
buttons tells you to tip your chapeau at a bit of
tricolor tacked on the wall of a big hall in Havre
the day you step off the ship. What is a “chapeau,”
anyhow? Nor will you be much more of a French
man on that day five years later, when a black
gowned French judge in Bordeaux asks you when
Napoleon was born, and then tips off a big bruiser
I alongside of him to shout “salp ya-god!” at you in
I French. When the Boss of the Bastide catches you
outside the courthouse door a minute later, and slips
you a ticket for a good job as a checker on the docks,
you may begin to think there is something in being
a Frenchman after all. In any event you will vote
the way that boss tells you, next November in the
Bastide, you bet ! The man who gives you a job can
have your vote for life. He has thé right idea, and
he can stand for all that there is to you of French
Government, just as long as that job lasts, whether
he knows anything about francs and reparations
or not.
But, God help you, are you a Frenchman? Shades
of buckeye, bluegrass and sage brush — you’ll say
“No!” Your heart is somewhere else, way down up
on the Suwanee River, or back yonder through the
sycamores where candle lights are gleaming, on the
banks of the Wabash far away ; or yet — and almost
you can not bear to think of it — in your little gray
home that was, in the West, or “down East,” ‘or
under the bright lights where your wandering friend
is about to give your regards to Broadway and per
haps even remember you to Herald Square. Oh, we
know where your heart is, down deep; we know full
well. It is far from France, though you try and try
to deceive yourself into feeling like a Frenchman.
Over the seas and far away, where the oak and the
ash and the .bonny willow tree all grow together up
in North Amerikee — that’s where your old Amer
ican heart is, all the “naturalization certificates” in
France can not change it.
Yet you have tried. It is better for your job,
for your business, to be a Frenchman — in France.
That means that it is better for your wife and
children, and after all, it is for them that you
have left America ; because you thought they would
have a better chance in France.
♦ ♦ ♦
To be sure, you have seen to it that the little
ones learn English, from you, at the same time that
they learn French, in the French school. Some day
they may go back to America — some day ! And then
they will thank their old father for that little echo
of the language that Americans speak.
Your own tie to your home tongue comes in the
little American paper published in France. It is
called the French Courier, but it is printed in Eng
lish; and in the close-knit American colony in that
quarter of Bordeaux known as “Little America” they
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Give the Younger Generation a Chance
VOTE
96 | X | Simmons, P. J.
Regular Democratic and
Progressive Nominee
For
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SHERIFF
Multnomah County,
Oregon
Slogan:
Individual Homes Protected
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An Overseas Veteran
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(Paid Adv.)
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